Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw (opens in new tab)

So purely from a hacker perspective, I'm amused at the whining.

Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game.

Then someone shares the exploit with a bunch of script kiddies, they exploit it to the Nth degree, and the company immediately notices and shuts everyone down.

Like, my dudes, what did you think was going to happen?

You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points.

And instead, you integrate your exploit into hip new thing, share it at scale, write blog posts and short form video content about it, basically launch a DDoS against the service you're exploiting, and then are shocked when the exploit gets patched and whine about your free thing getting taken away?

Like, what did you expect was going to happen?

So the timeline is basically

* User uses Google oauth to integrate their open claw

* user gets banned from using Google AI services with no warning

* user still gets charged

If you go backwards, getting charged for services you can't access is rough. I feel sorry for those who are deeply integrated into Google services or getting banned on their main accounts. It's not a great situation.

Also, getting banned without warning is rough as well. I wonder if the situation will be different for business accounts as opposed what seems like personal accounts?

The ban itself seems fair though, google is allowed to restrict usage of their services. Even though it's probably not developer friendly, it's within their rights to do so.

I guess there's some level of post mortem to do on the openclaw side too.

* Why did openclaw allow Google anti gravity logins?

* The plugin is literally called "google-antigravity-auth", why didn't that give the signal to the maintainers?

* Why don't the maintainers, for an integration project, do due diligence checks on the terms of service of everything you're integrating with?

Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 :

"We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users."

This is draconian.

> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.

I don't know why people here can't accept the simple fact that AI companies are offering cheap "unlimited" plans as a loss leader to tie you to their ecosystem, and then make up for it via add-ons, upsells, ads etc. If you use those API tokens to access external services it defeats the purpose. The hack may have worked so far, mainly because no one was checking, but they are all going to tighten the access eventually (as Anthropic and Google have already done).

Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.

I'm very confused here. The monthly plans are meant to be used inside of Google's walled garden, but people are somehow able to capture (?) and re-use the oAuth token?

Regardless, I thought it was pretty obvious that things like OpenClaw require an API account, and not a subsidized monthly plan.

Google's Pro service (no idea about ultra and I have no intention to find out) is riddled with 429s. They have generous quotas for sure, but they really give you very low priority. For example, I still dont have access to Gemini 3.1 from that endpoint. It's completely uncharacteristic of Google.

I analyzed 6k HTTP requests on the Pro account, 23% of those were hit with 429s. (Though not from Gemini-CLI, but from my own agent using code assist). The gemini-cli has a default retry backoff of 5s. That's verifiable in code, and it's a lot.

I dont touch the anti-gravity endpoint, unlike code-assist, it's clear that they are subsidizing that for user acquisition on that tool. So perhaps it's ok for them to ban users form it.

I like their models, but they also degrade. It's quite easy to see when the models are 'smart' and capacity is available, and when they are 'stupid'. They likely clamp thinking when they are capacity strapped.

Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying. I spent a decade at Google, and it's sad to see how they are executing here, despite having solid models in gemini-3-flash and gemini-3.1

This is the first time in recent memory that software has had high variable costs so the surprise at these rules is understandable.

In this case, a the difference in context cache hit rate between openclaw and antigravity.

For example if openclaw starts every message with the current time hh:mm:ss at the top of the context window, followed by the full convo history, it would have a cache hit rate if ~0. Simply moving the updated time to each new message incrementally would increase hit rate to over 90%. Idk if openclaw does this but there’s many many optimizations like this. And worse, thrashing the cache has non linear effects on the server as more and more users’ cached contexts get evicted from cache due to high cardinality. The cost to serve difference could be >10x.

Google is the furthest behind on coding agent adoption and has all the incentives to allow off policy use to grow demand. But it would probably be better to design their own optimized openclaw and serve that for free than let any unoptimized requests in.

If you go to an all you can eat buffet, ignore the plates they give you, and start filling up your own takeaway boxes with days worth of food, you'd expect to be kicked out.

No one would think this is unreasonable. You're not paying for unlimited food forever, you're paying for all you can eat in the restaurant right there.

I don't understand how this can be enforced without ridiculous levels of false positives. I'm truly baffled. The same with Claude Code situation.

gemini-cli, claude-code, codex etc, they ALL have a -p flag or equivalent, which is non-interactive IO interface for their LLM inference.

If I wire my tooling (or openclaw) to use the -p flag (or equivalents), is that allowed?

Okay, maybe they get rid of the -p flag and I have to use an interactive session. I can then just use OS IO tooling to wire OpenClaw with their cli. Is that allowed?

How does sending requests directly to the endpoints that their CLI is communicating with suddenly make their subsidized plans expensive? Is it because now I can actually use my 100% quota? If that's so, does it mean their products are such that their profitability stands on people not using them?

What is even going on?

Of course Google can restrict how their API is accessed. But locking paid accounts with no warning, no explanation email, and no functioning support path while continuing to charge $249/month is a different problem entirely. A reasonable enforcement process would have been a warning email, grace period to stop using the tool, then restriction.

What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.

Google, unlike all their competitors, actually give Cloud API credits to all paying users of AI Pro and AI Ultra [1] - just use those for direct Gemini/Vertex API access instead of trying to hack the OAuth of Google's apps.

[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...

Google deciding to willy nilly unilaterally ban my 20+ year old primary Google account is probably my greatest internet fear, given how famously awful their support is. Seems like it's the singular best example of a tech company so big that through some combination of internal silos and TOS bureaucracy you have no shot of getting your account back, no matter how unreasonable the ban actually is.

A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.

Same for using OpenCode.

https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50

https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/issue...

https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50

Some additional discussion on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1r2hnn8...

So a Google AI pro/ultra account is intended to be used from their cli or tools (like their open-gravity agent front end).

Their API usage isn't included in these plans, although under the hood open-gravity uses the API.

People have been using the API auth credential intended for anti-gravity with open claw, presumably causing a significant amount of use and have been caught.

The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the them.

I don’t think either OpenAI or Anthropic any API use in their ‘pro’ plans either?

This reminds me of the customers of “unlimited broadband” of yesteryear getting throttled or banned for running Tor servers.

Anthropic did something similar too didn't they, iirc it was blocking 3rd party tools from the subscription plans?

Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?

Edit: I have misread some of the comments here, he didn't lose access to his whole account and data just the antigravity part. I should've done my due diligence, get out of bed and spent more time thinking instead of emotionally reacting. Guess the rage machine got me as well. Damn. I think this thread might be hijacked by ai bros.

The main point still stands, google is part of a duopoly that runs the world. You can't be a functional member of society without them. They're like a public utility and plays too big of a role in people's life to take decisions based on unknown internal policies. They're long overdue for a government intervention or for splitting up.

People seem to be continuously outraged by these AI subscriptions banning third party use. However, the usage patterns of the intended apps likely differ hugely from those of the third party ones.

For example, basically every first party agent harness aggressively caches the input tokens to optimise inference, something that third party harnesses often disgregard, or are fundamentally incompatible with as they switch agents for subtasks and the like.

To extend this use case though, how much do poeple expect to be able to use the internal API's of the apps they subscribe to?

If I buy an Uber One subscription, am I then justified reverse engineering the gazeteer API from the app and reusing it in other apps I use? What about the speech to text API MS Teams must use for transcribing meetings as part of a business standard subscription?

I think these are obvious and emphatic breaches that no reasonable person would expect to be justified in, maybe miffed if your clever hack gets banned, but being banned would be considered fair play.

I fail to see the distinction.

To be accurate, when you auth OpenClaw the Google page specifically says to not proceed unless you are authorizing a Google product.

I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.

Meanwhile it's day 3? 4? since Gemini 3.1 was announced with a claim that Gemini CLI users would have access to it, but AI Pro subscribers still don't see it, and there's been no clarification from Google about what is going on, and why:

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/19532

They are not serious. I only keep the "AI Pro" sub because it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family.

Anyways, Google, nobody wants to use your bad VSCode fork. I want to use my own tools, and use your model where it makes sense as part of my own workflow.

I'll admit to knowingly taking advantage of Google's pricing, but I had assumed it was within a gray area. No warning bans are insane.

The OAuth token replay discussion here highlights a broader problem with the OpenClaw ecosystem: there is no standardized trust model between agents and the services they access.

When people grab OAuth tokens for replay in OpenClaw, they are essentially doing at the user level what malicious skills do at the agent level — bypassing intended access controls because the system has no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate use.

This is the same pattern showing up everywhere: - 312,000 instances on Shodan with no auth (CyberSecurityNews) - 40,000+ exposed instances (SecurityScorecard this week) - 824+ malicious skills in ClawHub - Infostealers now grabbing entire agent identities (Hudson Rock)

The common thread: agents operate with broad, undifferentiated access. No permission tiers, no credential isolation, no audit trail.

Until the ecosystem adds proper trust layers at both the platform level (what Google is clumsily trying to do here) and the host level (monitoring what agents actually do with their access), this cat-and-mouse will continue.

Between this, and whatever Claude has been doing lately, like giving the AI the ability to just disconnect if it dislikes your prompt, I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at.

> Product usage subsidized by company, $100. Users inevitably figure out how to steal those subsidies, agents go brrrrr. Users mad that subsidy stealing gets cut off and completely ignore why they need to rely on subsidies in the first place, priceless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073097

I'd like to add, that's "priceless" for "them" and not for you.

Everyone's debating whether Google's TOS is fair.

The real issue is that we're building entire development workflows on subsidized inference that was never priced to be used this way.

OpenClaw burns tokens at a rate these $200/month plans were never designed for.

The fix isn't nicer ban policies, it's either honest API pricing or local models good enough for the job.

The 0.5B-3B parameter range is already surprisingly capable for code analysis tasks.

That's where this is heading whether Google likes it or not.

So what is a "good-enough" model to use for OpenClaw now that the subscriptions are blocked. Is there an all you can eat subscription model that can be used?

Reading the thread, there are two non-issues and one big issue.

1. Can a company change their ToS to clarify that you can't "hack" their Oauth for other tools -- Yes, no question

2. Should they enforce the ToS, absolutely

The elephant in the room is Google has no support infrastructure and setup no notice drip campaign before they started banning out-right.

They could've easily rate-limited or even blocked requests authed from apps outside Anti-gravity, but banning entire accounts is pretty ridiculous. It'll just lose them very eager AI enthusiasts who are the audience they NEED to grow their new experiments.

It's bad business and not in their best long-term interests. Big fail. This is the way a startup may act because they're going broke on traffic -- not Google.

Yup. Last week my Ultra account got ToS-banned from both the Gemini CLI and Antigravity simply for using OpenCode. Try as I might, I haven't been able to resolve the issue. I can technically still use the Gemini web/app, but it's remarkably terrible in just about every conceivable way. A truly impressive feat in itself.

a preview of things to come, when the entire software trade is reliant on these third party services

all hosted by companies so huge they consider your $200/month to be an annoyance

rather than something valuable

That is presumably the end game - monthly subscription in a walled garden app while they have your balls in a vice grip and can squeeze however many dollars you’ll bear

I bet Google is thankful that anthropic took one for the team by going first.

Also if it wasn’t for Chinese providers we’d basically already be in triopoly.

Perplexity had a ban wave this weekend too

Both Google and Anthropic are choosing the wrong route here. While I see the formal aspect of abusing an OAuth token and burning through subsidized tokens, this only creates an internal accounting problem in the short term.

Meanwhile the rising popularity of Claws creates a yet untapped new market segment where users spend significant tokens.

A „soft“ migration of users by explaining to them how the API works, how to pay and how to change from OAuth would be way smarter.

The way this plays out right now is that current Claws users are massively penalized by being suspended indefinitely and new users will think twice. And we can expect a solid PR disaster / Streisand effect for the „poor“ model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic.

Commercially choosing the soft route by warning and throttling will be way smarter and possibly generate more long term revenue

This is exactly what happens when there's no accountability infrastructure for AI agents.

Google's response is to restrict access — a blunt instrument that punishes legitimate users because they have no way to verify which agents were behaving correctly and which weren't.

The real fix isn't restrictions, but cryptographic behavioral commitments — agents declare what they'll do before execution, and any third party can verify compliance after. We don't need gatekeepers. We need verification.

I've been building this: https://github.com/agbusiness195/NOBULEX

I used the pay as you go from google with openclaw for about one hour, then checked the next day and it cost me $7. It was the latest flash preview model. I can't justify the cost right now. At least I won't get banned though.

Wow, and I was complaining about Anthropic handling their comms.

For almost a trillion-dollar company, this is the worst customer experience I've ever seen. Departments sending poor guy to each other like a hot potato. Huge aura loss.

Why can third party application log on with OAuth if it is not allowed? Shouldn't it be really straightforward for google to not allow the OAuth when the requesting app is not a google app?

It would be fun if Google lost its months of edge in the LLM value race because it alienated early adopters paying $250/month by using a 0-strike system with no customer support.

Yann Lecun warned that closed sourced models are the only true danger we are facing with LLMs (answering a question about "Will AI turn into Terminator" type of question).

He was right.

Sad, but inevitable. I guess only openai allows for this kind of usage now and copilot?

The only reason the subs are worth it to them, is to get you into their toolchain. It sucks but inevitable

I have never let openclaw touch my Google Account. I have used it only a few times using OpenCode and still my account was banned for violating ToS. Took me a while to figure it out because antigravity never shows you the specific error that occurred, just a simple "Something went wrong". They really should be more transparent about this, at least anthropic makes it clear upfront.

Looks like they are banning for using Gemini CLI / antigravity (subscription) endpoints instead of using Gemini API (pay as you go) endpoints.

It's the old playbook again. They're using massive money to distort the market until the competition is bled dry while also operating the platform and using signal from the platform to target their competitors, classic DMA violation really. This all boils down to Chinese vendors getting banned from the market for "national security reasons" because if not, this all dies in a fire for Google investors. Nothing a gold pixel phone to the right places can't fix

It makes some sense. Some of the skills are malware, and google absolutely has the power to detect it by inspecting LLM I/O. If Google suspects that google account credentials have been compromised (via connecting to a malicious "integration"), it is rational to freeze the account (as opposed to letting the threat actors ride with the credentials they've stolen)

TOS is TOS and if there is one company not to mess with it's Google because they don't give 2 shits about you. Going straight to a ban with 0 warning and 0 appeal possibility is exactly why I'll never use googles AI chat/coding products, it's just not worth the risk getting banned and losing access to other google services.

Every day Google shows its true evil nature. So here clearly they want to offset competitors. That's the true agenda. We saw this when Google crippled ublock origin and then claimed the extension is "harmful", merely because it threatens Google's greed-income via ads.

Glad I saw this. I just installed openclaw on a fly.io machine to test out and planned to use my pro account.

Who here reads the full terms of service of every Google product they use? The fact that they disabled the whole Google account without warning is damning.

They could have easily just blocked the Gemini / Antigravity use and and/or sent a "final warning" kind of email beforehand.

The only suckers here are those paying $249 a month to Google instead of used GPU sellers.

Ai has really struggled for a strong/kill-app use case for which supports such enormous humongous historical investments (TRILLIONS)

It looks like its been found. The irony is, these model providers are now saying : "not like that!"

If I was an investor in an AI provider I would be quite worried.

1) Switching between LLM API:s is incredibly easy if you are not concerned with differences in personality. As the models get better, it is less important to pick the best one.

2) The products built to bundle the API with a user experience are difficult to build on a level that outclasses open source alternatives.

3) Building an understanding of the user to increase the product value over time and create stickiness is effective, but imho less effective over time as time passes and the user changes. For example, I suspect that these adaptations have a hard time to unlearn things that are no longer true. Learning about the user opaquely is less useful to the user and doing it overtly makes it easier to take the learnings and go. (Besides, it is probably not legal under the GDPR to not let the user export the learnings and take them to another provider.)

Taken together, the moat becomes quite shallow. I see why they aggressively ban any tools demonstrating when open alternatives are in fact better than their own walled gardens.

edit: readability.

This is like ISPs banning customers in the 90s for using Napster to download music.

It was already pretty restricted due to ludicrous rate limiting. I tried it just for fun with my Pro account and it was unusable. It couldn't do tasks properly without hitting rate limit, every other prompt.

I'd rather use Chinese models like Kimi K2.5 or Minimax M2.5 for personal agents at this point. They are almost as smart but 10x cheaper and their attitude towards subscribers is use where you want.

Google PR: "blame automation as we are not making money!"

lol, funny that this time they can't say "malicious users from china!"

Well, better start separating out your Google accounts.

Don't want to risk losing access to your Google Photos, Drive, Gmail, etc.

Although from a brief read, it seems the user still has access to other Google services.

Well, better start segregating for Google accounts.

Don't want to risk loosing access to your Google Photos, Drives, Gmail, etc.

Although at a brief read, it seems the user still have access to other Google services.

An AI company restricting the access of AIs to their AI.

Exactly my kind of humor.

A lot of people running OpenClaw just have it generated and burning tokens for no reason. They just know more tokens = doing stuff so want to spend as many tokens as possible.

Clearly the demand for special claw plans is right there. (eg Kimi.com already has plans with a one-click claw install included. I thought one or two others too)

I can guarantee in their attempt to stop OpenClaw users, some users using it normally will get caught in the dragnet. It could mean your whole Google account is suspended, not just for Antigravity.

I would highly encourage you to not only stop using Antigravity oAuth for OpenClaw, but to use Antigravity with a side account or stop using it altogether. Is using Antigravity worth losing your main account or getting it banned for using paid services (for extra storage, YouTube premium, etc). Even side accounts are risky since in the post thread people are saying Google applied the ban to all their accounts.

This is funny because in this area the most valuable good is NOT knowledge, yet the dinosaurs behave like it was, protecting the wrong thing.

Of course they don't like it. CLAW makes the platform fungible and once that happens the magic by which their insane multiples of values exist bursts.

Likely very legit restriction based on ToS violation.

People accounts shouldn't be used by bots. That's what service accounts are for.

My gemini cli access was restored today

I believe google might be coming up with similar offering hence this is first step to restrict user to use rival products.

3.1 has made running the API so cheap that this doesn't really matter.

Who in their right might thinks it's a good idea to use something they pay a NAMED SUBCRIPTION FOR as a secondary engine in another tool?

Like, it's hilarious some of you guys think it's OC's fault for this.

It's open source software, with extensive documentation that anything you do with it being at your own risk.

It's no one's fault but the people plugging their oauth into this thing like complete MORONS lol

Page archive: https://archive.ph/YWmbx

Account ban?

I just use Gemini 3.1 Pro (High) on Antigravity.

GPT-5.3-Codex is the best on OpenClaw.

Sonnet 4.6 uses 50x more session tokens than GPT-5.3-Codex on OpenClaw.

It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable.

It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.

I was going to ask the other day, how long until people start getting banned left and right from the big services, after they start using / integrating openclaw? Seems like the other big issues, other than the security aspects. And knowing how kafkaesque it is to deal with companies like google, I don't hope the claw practitioners are too integrated with products from companies like google.

Is this how tech companies operate now...

1) Stand up a service 2) ??? 3) Profit

??? - worry about any substantial support later

Why they can't rate limit or do some other sensible resource management? Too hard?

Isn't this sort of repeated communication gaffe why they hired @OfficialLoganK?

Oof. Google definitely fired too many people if this is how they are handling account violations for people paying them multiple hundreds of dollars a month.

Normally there would be a normal, well adjusted person in the room to remind them that "zero tolerance" policies for situations that can happen by mistake is silly

We are in 2026, AI is all around, and we still need to accept Google doing this?

Why is everyone surprised, these subscriptions are basically toys. You pay so much, and you get about that much in inference compute, more if you’re lucky / early.

If you want to real use these things get an API key and pay the true marginal cost of your compute like a grown up.

At this point im reaching the conclusion that Google hates winning.

Is there any restrictions if you use something like OpenRouter?

<Blasts terminal>: Boring conversation anyway.

At this point, running Chinese model like GLM-5 or Kimi K2 would be far more safer than risking off your LLM subscriptions. Quite the irony that our AI techno-feudal corpo overlords doesn't want to see their LLM take off with curious and useful open source ideas. Just like Microsoft, they deliberately buried it for some reason.

Oh, maybe not, they did it in the name of "terms of service abuse" and "risk assessment".

Thus it would be far better if we can just have SOTA open weight model to run OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Molt at least we are under control. And as you see the two Chinese models I mentioned are indeed open weight, albeit taking atrocious amount of resource to really self host, and you probably need to have abliterations to remove their political guardrails.

Sigh. We can't have great things with those big tech corpos and CCP politics. Big question: Why has this world gone to shit lately.

I can confirm, happened to me a few days ago

> we are unable to reverse the suspension

I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.

Well OpenClaw is an OpenAI product now, right?

Effectively.

Does anyone know if this ban means you lose your email/pixel/youtube/google ads/google gtm stuff?

This basically makes it a deal breaker to use google ai stuff because you can be royally fucked by one ban.

See? This is what a monopoly player flexing looks like. For the people putting all their eggs in a single basket. Can we please stop supporting centralised services? It only gets worse from here.

legit ban, violating tos, using antigravity tokens for open claw token burning machine

And the AI price shock begins…

one of my account is banned without any reason. I don't even use OpenClaw.

These companies are engaged in a sort of AI dumping. Cheap inference below cost.

Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance.

It's the big tech playbook.

I don't think it's going to work this time.

Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly.

LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs.

Telecom tech killed telecom dominance.

With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.

Not your infra not your AI

This is such a braindead move. Western AI companies short-term greed will just let Chinese companies win. If I were google, I'd just throttle or release a heavily cached version of their API for OpenClaw and automatically detect and direct openclaw usage to this model. Personally, Anthropic and Google's recent moves are just making me go all-in on self-hosted AI.

LOL. This entire thread basically reads why you should never build dev tools. It's difficult to find a more entitled, cheapskate bunch of people who are completely clueless about business.

TIL it's "unfair" to sell a product for a particular purpose and offer subsidised rates to build a customer base. Different planet.

I am in that phase of my life that seeing people complaining about big techs gives me no sympathy.

These companies keep telling you that you own nothing, they change their TOS without informing you, they collect everything they can from you and yet, you spend $249/mo for their service.

I mean......

I'm struggling with the economics. It comes off as performative bullshit to me. I thought we were buying entire Apple machines to run our "claws". But, we are simultaneously so poor that we have to smuggle tokens?

Meh, that's ok. Not using openclaw anyway. Doesn't sound useful to be frank.

For fuck sake, OpenClaw is destroying everything. Shitty users of OpenClaw will force the LLM providers to limit quotas for legitimate users. OpenClaw should die.

How!!!

How

This kind of crap is exactly what I don't want to spend energy worrying about, so I'll wait a few months for the models I can host to catch up.

This is how open source wins

big company doesn't want you using something other than their stuff and they'll steal your money and ban you, or similarly, big company wants your data... this happens every day. its nice having choices isnt it? ill just leave this big company and use... oh wait. its another big company.

I guess Google feels unsafe, one way or another.

Assuming these plans are based on Gemini, Google is doing these users a favor, frankly.

So there is such a thing as a free lunch! Oh wait...

That's BS

You might want to read the terms of service next time before you utilize a service that you are unfamiliar with! Google refuses to let you use your oath with openclaw because they refuse to subsidize the slop that it is processing. It is not worth giving free frontier models from Google Gemini Pro for the basic tasks you are looking to complete with open claw I would know because I've been developing with AI for over a decade. Openclaw has a lot of potential. It's a pretty neat tool. I have to admit. My favorite part is that you can point the URL for the large language model to anywhere you want. Since most of you guys only have a rudimentary understanding of the difference between AI systems and know that there are options for local and cloud models, we are going to expand your knowledge base today. Cloud models are great. They are able to set their own terms. Google gives free compute with oath connections. They have stated very clearly that you must be a paid API user and that you are not able to use oath and using oath with openclaw will result in termination of your account immediately because the tasks you are asking Gemini to do are for a preschooler.. We have known this for at least a week at the Atlanta technology development Center and we were able to get an account restored by apologizing. However, we knew in advance that it was going to get nuked. This is actually an open claw issue not a Google issue because openclaw is the one that's still allows for 05 connections and is not made the change to single-handedly only permit API connections. If they only permitted API connections through Google Gemini they would stop any of their users from being banned but they haven't made that change yet. So if you are mad at someone be mad at Peter steinberger for not shipping faster or paying attention to terms of service or the recent slew of complaints from users. This isn't my department. I don't want to figure it out. You can handle it.

You really think Google wants to subsidize compute so that you can organize your freaking calendar you morons? Sounds like a great use of a data center where you could just click accept invite. Oh, you can't reply to text messages, so you trust AI to do it now. Wow! You must be the laziest piece of s** on the planet. Oh email's too much for you? Let me tell you what inbox zero as a mandatory process looks like when you wake up with 150 emails on average every single day over a a 7-year period and you handle every single one every single day before you leave the office with zero unread and zero pending reply. You get really good at making sure every single customer is handled. When customer service is not optional and your service level agreement is that you answer customers 24/7 365 you do it immediately without question and everything is solved before the lights are turned off and if something goes wrong at any time of the day that phone's getting picked up ring one and the problem is being solved before the line is hung up or there's an escalation to management and it is handled on the spot. Some of you are a little soft and don't actually believe in putting in the work or putting yourself in positions that will leave you slightly inconvenienced because it would be way too much to ask for you to stay 3 hours after work if that's what it takes to build a billion dollar company. I really hope you enjoy dinner with your family every single night at 4:59 p.m. Sharp while you get smoked by people that are actually staying at the office. So now that the only two options you think you have are paying someone for their large language model because you are poorly researched and don't know how to build your own system taking thousands of dollars and buying something with over a terabyte of RAM that spits out a hundred tokens a second. Maybe you can do that 10 times to get a thousand tokens a second if you really want to drop 100 Grand on new macbooks. That's about a quarter of the speed of meta which offers infinite free compute if you cleared their wait list as a developer(6+ month waitlist for consideration).If you don't have free compute from meta, I feel bad for you because they were giving 3,000 requests per minute until openclaw came out and that's only 10 requests per a minute because they got real tired real quick of these 24/7 agents taken up all the compute to do. Jack diddly s** I will tell you that. Claude grok meta Google and almost any frontier model you haven't heard of will give you infinite free compute if you are building products that have never been seen before. I'm not sure what Peter was doing spending 20,000 a month on compute. Does anyone have a figure on how many credits he burned? Cuz I'm in the tens of billions and my compute spend is $0 over 18 months. It's really interesting what happens to your account when you feed it, new data, new solutions and try to build theoretical software that is not currently possible with what is available today and then you come back when the new model comes out. They welcome you with open arms and they don't charge you to use it and they do a lot of heavy lifting without much of a cap. The point of this is to you mention that you do not need millions, probably even hundreds of thousands of parameters for your basic tasks that you are too lazy to handle yourself. I honestly am not so sure what any of you are doing with open claw when cursor builds much better software. In my professional opinion, the most effective way to utilize open claw is by building your own decision tree or something similar that has a pretty rigid process and follows exactly what it should do without thinking. You guys would be amazed to know that you can build a fully functional model that does everything you need and completes every task a customer will ask for with a 12 KB file it runs with less than 15% of your total compute on four cores and takes less than 2 GB of RAM on a web server. It provides instant response with no processing delay. It knows exactly what the customer is asking and matches it up with the correct response. It is able to process images using data sets which are also very lightweight because they are specific to your business. So next time you try to set up openclaw, ask whatever AI you're using just to rip out the apis that comes with and build your own model which you will host on your local system server. You might need to ask it to refactor for firebase or whoever else you're going to be hosting with. Go ahead and keep paying digitalocean $6 a month for the worst VM I've ever seen. That's a great investment and their current best practices go against the current best practices that open claw recommends, so I would not recommend any third party providers, even if they are worth $5 billion because they do not maintain as fast as openclaw ships. Any questions I'm available but I probably don't want to help you unless you're paying me a lot of money because I and I'm kind of a big deal in case you can't tell.

Google opens claw! /s

Thanks, Google.

AI or no AI, every company this big needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.

It's the luxury gym membership model. They want you on the monthly subscription, but put up roadblocks that prevent use.

Take your money to the Chinese companies instead. These evil megacorps are more interested in destroyed your privacy in service to the Epstein Cabal controlling every facet of your life. How dare Google, a trillion dollar company, charge you for AI ultra then ban you for using your own credits/usage allowance. This whole debacle, along with Anthropic, fall foul of The Digital Human Right to Adversarial Interoperability.

It is imperative that open source wins this battle. Not these evil megacorps and their substandard tools.

Are Google engineers so inept as to not be able to integrate technical measures against oc use? Do they think people using these plugins know the mechanisms used? And after all that they have the nerve to ban you from using their own products (AG). Ridiculous company.

While the frustration is understandable I don't see any difference between this and Netflix not allowing you to use your Netflix subscription in Amazon Prime federated video hub or something of that sort.

At the end of the day we know that these tools are massively subsidised and they do not reflect the real cost of usage. It is a fair-use model at best and the goal is to capture as market share as possible.

I am a no defender of Google and I've been burned many times by Google as well but I kind of get it?

That being said, you don't really need to use your gemini subscription in openclaw. You can use gemini directly the way it was intended and rip the benefits of the subsidised plan.

I developed an open source tool called Pantalk which sits as a background daemon and exposes many of the communication channels you want as a standard CLI which gemini can use directly. All you need is just some SKILL.md files to describe where things are at and you are good to go. You have openclaw without openclaw and still within TOS.

The project is hosted at: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk

This is bullish! Big props to google for stepping in over 7,000 API keys have been compromised due this openclawd crap.

Ironically, Gemini says that it’s OK to use the Ultraplan for OpenClaw via gemini-cli because the Ultra plan has some API & Cloud credits baked into it. I think $100/mo but I can never figure out how Google billing works. I’ve pasted the response I got when I was asking it about OpenClaw. There is legal precedent for an AI hallucination being used to upload a contract (e.g, an AI customer support for an airline made a false claim and the customer bought a ticket based on that claim) so it will be interesting to see if Google reverts the bans since Gemini hallucinated that OpenClaw was OK:

  This is a critical question because the answer is different for Google vs.   Anthropic, and getting it wrong with Anthropic can actually get your account banned.
  Here is the reality of the situation based on current Terms of Service and recent community reports.
  1. Google (Gemini Ultra + gemini-cli)
  Verdict: Safe (Authorized Feature)
  Google explicitly built the gemini-cli bridge to allow Ultra subscribers to use their plan programmatically. This is not a "hack" or a gray-area wrapper; it is an official feature.
  • Why it's okay: You are authenticating via gcloud or the official CLI login flow. Google tracks this usage against your specific "Agent" quotas (currently ~200 agent requests/day for Ultra users).
  • The Limit: As long as you are using the official gemini-cli as the bridge, you are compliant.
  • The Risk: If you use a different unofficial script that scrapes the gemini.google.com web interface (simulating a browser) rather than using the official CLI, you risk a ban for "scraping." But since you are using gemini-cli, you are in the clear.