It’s about to get more expensive for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools.
According to a customer email shared on Hacker NewsAnthropic said that as of noon Pacific on April 4th (today), subscribers “will no longer be able to use Claude subscription limits for third-party braids, including OpenClaw.” Instead, they’ll have to pay for extra usage through “a payment option billed separately from your subscription.”
The company said that while it’s starting with OpenClaw today, the policy “applies to all third-party plugins and will roll out to more soon.”
Anthropic’s Claude Code head Boris Cherny wrote to X that the company’s subscriptions were not created for the usage patterns of these third-party tools, and that Anthropic is now trying “To be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably over the long term.”
The announcement comes after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he would join Anthropic competitor OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open source project backed by OpenAI.
Steinberger published that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk some sense into Anthropic,” but were only able to delay the increased pricing by a week.
“It’s funny how the timings match, first they copy some popular features in their closed zone, then they lock the open source,” Steinberger said.
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Cherny, however, he insisted that the members of Claude Code’s team are “big fans of open source” and that he “just uploaded some [pull requests] to improve cache efficiency specifically for OpenClaw.”
“This is more about mechanical limitations,” he said, adding that Anthropic still offers full refunds to subscribers. “We know that not everyone has realized that this is not something that we support and this is an effort to make that clear and clear.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI recently shut down its Sora app and video production models, reportedly to free up computing resources and as part of a broader effort to refocus on winning over software engineers and businesses that increasingly rely on products like Claude Code.
