Boris from Claude Code said publicly on Twitter that CLI-style usage is allowed. We took that seriously and invested time building around that guidance. I even changed the defaults, so when using the cli we're automatially disabling features that use excessive tokens like the heartbeat feature. But in practice, Anthropic still blocks parts of our system prompt, so the actual behavior today does not match what was communicated publicly.
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2041035127430754686
They since seemed to changed their classifier as people hack around it, as it is trivial to do so with a few renames. I'm not playing that game so it's in a weird limbo where it should work in theory but doesn't in practice.
It seems with the new "--bare" flag they are introducing, a huge rug pull is coming as they plan to deprecate -p for unlimited users.
The docs now read:
> "Bare mode skips OAuth and keychain reads. Anthropic authentication must come from ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or an apiKeyHelper in the JSON passed to --settings. Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry use their usual provider credentials. --bare is the recommended mode for scripted and SDK calls, and will become the default for -p in a future release."
Hope I am reading this wrong or this is clarified.
There is one simple policy: Subscriptions are for use on human scale of comprehension. API Keys are for everything else.
Anthropic can have a machine/bot get rate limited and people can build workflows using `claude -p` or something even better (like an SDK) , all the while using their OAuth tokens for max/pro.
You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.
There will be a time for OpenClaw, but in the current world with limited compute, that time is not now.
This kind of thing is the exception. Subsidized subscriptions work to distort the power of the market. The more successful they are (in destroying competition), the worse it leaves consumers.
While i get the individual steps that leads them to this "difficult position", I think i'll just keep telling everybody to cancel their sub and make sure to not get locked in.
This is somehow doubly wrong. Not only are most economic goods NOT commodities, there are plenty of economic analogs to AI subscriptions (streaming, telecom, gyms, buffets) and none of them operate as "unlimited with no restrictions on re-use". Really just terribly misinformed way of thinking here.
I've complained, extensively, about this before but Anthropic really needs to make it clear what is and is not supported with or without a subscription. Until then, it's hard to know where you stand with using their products.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't use OpenClaw or any Claw-like product currently. I just want to know what I can and can't do and currently it's impossible to know.
I can’t tell you how relieved I am that there are many capable open weight models in the wild to keep a ceiling on bad behavior.
How can I buy into an ecosystem that might disallow one of my main workflows? I currently use several hook scripts to route specific work to different models. Will they disallow that at some point? We don't know because they can't get their story straight.
Anthropic is destroying goodwill that is hard-won in this space. At the end of the day, people just need to do their work in a way that makes sense for them. In my case (someone who has been building ML/AI tools for 25 years @ MS & Apple), I have much better results using my bespoke harness. If I'm paying $200/month for compute, I should be able to use it in a way that works for me. Given the push back, I'm not alone.
its abstracted so it doesnt look like a claude code harness per se but it works like one.
docs/recipies.md shows the ralph loop
A company built groundup on rule-breaking? Ain't gonna happen.
It seems like a tall order to set lasting rules in this space at this point, where nobody really understands what is going to happen in a few weeks.
I do agree, though, that the parts of this that were actually using the Claude system to generate OAuth keys themselves are a little sus.
That makes sense to say “must use Claude harness to login before calling Claude cli or using Claude code sdk”
Working As Designed, clearly.
Anthropic staff have had contradictive statements in Twitter and have corrected each other. Their intent for clarifications lead to confusion.
> OpenClaw treats Claude CLI reuse and claude -p usage as sanctioned for this integration unless Anthropic publishes a new policy.
Oh cool, so everything is back to business now, until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything.
Anthropic have proved themselves to be be unreliable when it comes to CC. Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.
Best and most applicable typo ever ʕ ´ • ᴥ •̥ ` ʔ
At least the only action I was still able to perform was to refund the user, or paypal would have just kept the money.
It's just OpenClaw people claiming "Anthropic told us it's fine".
What's not allowed is grabbing the oauth tokens and using these for your own custom agent, which is what was (and still is) banned.
Nothing has changed, this appears to just be a giant misunderstanding (and probably a poor choice of words from Openclaw).
I don't see anything on this page that claims something different from that, or that addresses that claim at all.
I remember when I’d periodically rage quit from Uber One to Lyft Pink and back again every time I had a terrible customer-service experience. In the end, I realized picking a demon and getting familiar with its quirks was the better way to go.
I’m currently sticking with Claude, in part because I’m not exposed to this nonsense due to OpenClaw, in larger part because of the Hegseth-Altman DoD nonsense. More broadly, however, I’m not sure if any of Google, Anthropic or OpenAI are coming across as stars in AI communication and customer service.
Oh no. They won't update the policy. Boris or Thariq will casually mention in a random off-hand commebt on Twitter that this is banned now, and then will gaslight everyone that this has always been the case.
[0]: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2...
1. Take the oauth credentials and roll your own agent -- this is NOT allowed
2. Run your agentic application directly in Claude Code -- this IS allowed
When OpenClaw says "Open-Claw style CLI usage", it means literally running OpenClaw in an official Claude Code session. Anthropic has no problems with this, this is compliant with their ToS.
When you use Claude Code's oauth credentials outside of the claude code cli Anthropic will charge you extra usage (API pricing) within your existing subscription.
I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously.
They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most).
Anthropic just checks for that.
One day you're experimenting just fine. The next, everything breaks.
And I'd gladly use their web containerized agents instead (it would pretty much be the same thing), but we happen to do Apple stuff. So unless we want to dive into relying on ever-changing unreliable toolchains that break every time Apple farts, we're stuck with macOS.
The most recent Anthropic announcement was not that people would be banned for using subscriptions with OpenClaw, but that it would be charged as extra usage. I think the reason this was changed three days after that announcement is that being charged for extra usage meant people would not be banned for using their subscription OAuth tokens directly against the Anthropic API with a third party harness, as they had been before. But rather both that usage, and the more recent claude -p usage both be charged as extra usage.
Release notes and announcements are a well-known agentic anti-pattern.
If you're doing them, you're doing agentic wrong. /s-ish-also-cry
Anthropic was, even to me, “one of the better ones” until recently. They have made many questionable/poor decisions the last 6-8 weeks and people are right to call them out for it, especially when they want our money.
I still VERY occasionally use it (as I'm friggin able to anyway) but it's definitely nowhere near my usage previously. And I refuse to give them money, and besideswhich have no goddamn notion of whether it would even be worth it on the lowest paid tier.
Ah well. The free ride was fun but I knew it had a shelf life.
Google when they merged YouTube and Google+, Reddit multiple times, Facebook after countless scandals. Microsoft destroying windows and pushing ads.
At the end of the day a solid product and company can withstand online controversy.
I understand why they have to charge more, but not many are gonna be able to afford even $100 a month, and that doesn't seem to be sufficient.
It has to come with some combination of better algorithms or better hardware.
Not that they don't bring value, I'm just not convinced they'll be able to sell their products in a sticky enough way to make up the prices they'll have to extract to make up for the absurd costs.
I'd agree with you, except I've heard this argument before. Amazon, Google, Facebook all burned lots of cash, and folks were convinced they would fail.
On the other hand plenty burned cash and did fail. So could go either way.
I expect, once the market consolidates to 2 big engines, they'll make bonkers money. There will be winners and losers. But I can't tell you which is which yet.
hn is not a monolith. People here routinely disagree with each other, and that's what makes it great
Somewhat suspicious that if I do this without an official Anthropic notice I'll lose my precious Max $200/mo account so I'll sit tight perhaps for a while.
I had an idea on a whim to vibe-engineer an irccloud replacement for myself.
Started with claude web + Opus 4.7 and continued with Claude Code. Ate up two full cycles of my quota in maybe 6-10 prompts.
Then I iterated on that with pi.dev+codex for HOURS, managed to use 50% of my Codex Pro subscription.
With Claude it's a constant battle of typing /usage after every iteration and trying to guess if it's enough for the next task or not =)
I used to use GLM mostly and had a Claude Pro subscription for occasional review and clean up.
Now I just use GLM.
I do think Claude Max is value for money. But it's more value than I personally need and I like Anthropic less and less.
The other criticism I see is "ask it what happened in 1989" but as a my use case isn't writing a high school history essay I simply don't care. Or believe one should seek those kind of answers from any AI. (If you're curious it simply cuts off the reply).
I fully appreciate that YMMV and what sits right for others will not align with what's acceptable to me. Anthropic and OpenAI both are in my badbooks as much as Z.ai. pick your poison as they say.
I racked up about $28 worth of usage and then it just stopped consuming anymore, so I don't know if there was some other issue, but it was persistent.
I got sick of it and used a migration script to move my assistant's history and personality to a claude code config. With the new remote exec stuff, I've got the old functionality back without needing to worry about how bleeding-edge and prone to failure OpenClaw is.
I feel like this is what their plan was all along -- put enough strain and friction on the hobbyist space that people are incentivized to move over to their proprietary solution. It's probably a safer choice anyway -- though I'm sure both are equally vibe-coded.
(Well, 3rd party stuff was already illegal, and I believe remains so (sorta-kinda tolerated now? with the extra usage[0]) but enforcement seemed to be based on excessive usage of subs.)
Doing the same thing but with 50K of irrelevant, proprietary system prompt, doesn't seem to improve the situation!
i.e. my question here is: if you replicate OpenClaw with `claude -p prooompt` and cron, is Anthropic happy? (Or perhaps their hope is that the people able and willing to do that represent a rounding error, which is probably true.)
No memory, no cron/heartbeat, context mgmt is just "new chat", but enough to get you started.
Note: no sandboxing etc, I run this as unprivileged linux user. So it can blow up its homedir, but not mine. Ideally, I'd run it on a separate machine. (My hottest take here is "give it root on a $3 VPS, reset if it blows up" ;)
https://github.com/a-n-d-a-i/ULTRON
You may also enjoy CLIProxyAPI, which does the same thing (claude -p / codex exec) but shoves a OpenAI compatible API around it. Note: this probably violates every AI company's ToS (since it turns the precious subsidized subscription tokens into a generic API). OpenAI seems to tolerate such violations, for now, because they care about good. Anthropic and Google do not.
(Though Anthropic may auto-detect and bill it as extra usage; see elsewhere in this thread. Situation is very confusing right now.)
I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience?
I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harnesses I think. Even though I get why they want to own the eyeballs.
For a while there I had both Opus 4.6 and Codex access and I frequently pitted them against each other, I never once saw Opus come out ahead. Opus was good as a reviewer though, but as an implementer it just felt lazy compared to 5.4 xhigh.
One feature that I haven’t seen discussed that much is how codex has auto-review on tool runs. No longer are you a slave to all or nothing confirmations or endless bugging, it’s such a bad pattern.
Even in a week of heavy duty work and personal use I still haven’t been able to exhaust the usage on the $200 plan.
I’ll probably change my mind when (not IF) OpenAI rug pull, but for spring ‘26, codex is definitely the better deal.
Codex is abysmal for UI design imo.
But if you go information architecture first and have that codified in some way (espescially if you already have the templates), then you can nudge any agent to go straight into CSS and it will produce something reasonable.
I still have their subscription, but am using pi now, mainly because something happened that made my opencode sessions unusable (cannot continue them, just blanks out, I assume something in the sqlite is fucked), and I cannot be bothered to debug it.
For what I use the agents, the Chinese models are enough
Had to stop because they don't like us proxying requests anymore.
Anthropic models write much better code, they are easy to follow, reasonable and very close to what I've done if I had the time... OpenAI's on the other hand generate extremely complex solutions to the simplest problems.
I was so disappointed by non-Anthropic models, that for a couple of weeks I only used Anthropic models, but based on this thread, I'll go back and give it another try. It's good to go back and try things again every couple of weeks.
Of course, I was annoyed that they lobotomized 4.6, the difference was day and night, and Anthropic is certainly not a company I trust. In my opinion, it shows their willingness to rugpull, so I'm looking at other approaches.
All these models and agents are shortcuts for all of us to be lazy and play games and watch YouTube or Netflix because we use them to work-less, well the party will be over soon.
Still early days, but code is available, sort of works if you squint, and welcomes PRs: https://github.com/rcarmo/vibes/tree/go
Which I would not even try and test though if Anthropic did not ban my account. The shadiest thing I did was to use it with opencode for a while I think. Never installed claw or used CC tokens somewhere else.
This is a weird company doing weird shit.
Last year I was excited about the constant forward progress on models but since February or so its just been a mess and I want off this ride.
Either way I’m going to wait for “official” word from Anthropic, which I guess at this point will probably be a “Tell HN” or Reddit text post or a Xitter from some random employee’s personal account, because apparently that’s the state of corporate communication now.
But the bills comes thru, one has to pay AWS cause you need the servers, but pay AI agents that make mistake and everyone hopes they work just by typing and saying do x or y. And now they actually invented and engineering and deploy something called Adaptive Thinking and the models can allocate allocate zero reasoning tokens. Its game over, but it was over regardless, there is nothing special about models and they trained them now even with YouTube and soon to be Twitter(X), TikTok and bullshit. Now all those Nvidia GPUs interconnected via NVLink definitely powerful super computers, but the "software" let alone the "AI" is not there yet and OpenAI is worth close to 1 Trillions Dollars ... I mean come on!
You can also do convoluted things like run Claude Code within tmux and send input to it and read the output.
MCP Channels are interesting too for bidirectional communication between your app and a running Claude Code instance, with an MCP server sitting in between. It's slow, but allows for some interesting use cases when you want to step out of an existing CLI session to do work that is easier in a graphical interface, have Claude Code respond and do work, then when you're done, go back to the CLI session and continue, never losing context.
I'm doing this today in https://github.com/Cidan/ask -- works great.
If I'm paying for compute, why should it matter whether I use Anthropic's harness (e.g., Claude Code) or a 3rd-party harness?
With Claude Code they can predict what the traffic would look like with third party harness they cannot.
Anthropic is constantly destroying goodwill and now seems to be in panic mode.
Anyway, what I am looking for and am curious about is if there is a solution that I am overlooking that will work the same, or almost the same or better, but at a cheaper price.
I read about people being happy about pi.dev and OpenCode. I tried OpenCode with Mimo V2 pro and it is pretty good. I previously used Qwen CLI before they stopped the free usage, and Gemini CLI. I also used Z.ai with OpenCode.
I read about people using Opus for planning and then for non-important stuff moving the agent to use a further cheaper model. I am not into usage-based pricing unless it will be cheaper nonetheless (I doubt it though).
Do you have some cool setups to share? I usually do Python for backend and TypeScript frontend. Host on Hetzner, use mostly Docker but also k3s if required.
My main goal is to maximize my subscription token usage while trying to comply with the rules, but its not clear where the line is for automation so I feel like I need to be clever.
- regular development (most token use): all interactive claude mode, standard use case
- automated background development: experimenting with claude routines (first-class feature, on subscription)
- personal non-nanoclaw claude automations (claude -p): uses subscription token, but only called as needed (generally just fix something if something in my homelab infra goes does down, its set up to not fire on an exact cron time)
- other LLM based automations: usually openrouter API key, cheap models as needed
- nanoclaw: all API key based, but since its expensive I keep usage mostly minimal and try to defer anything heavyweight to one of the other automation strategies (nanoclaw mainly just connects my homelab infra with telegram)
I'm confused by the comments being full of people swearing off Claude, feels like real HN bubble stuff.
It'd be a lot cleaner if they just published explicit rate limits for each subscription tier instead of these vague policy statements.
Since the subscription is hard linked to an OAuth token this should be easy to track too. What am i missing?
Question to the sages: should that submission get flagged because of that?
Contrast that to what GitHub did which was to pause new customers to ensure quality remained and things were stable.
In the Claude site they added the option to buy extra usage at 30% off if you buy $1,000 or more at a time, so it's still somewhat cheaper to use OpenClaw with a claude account compared to an API key.
(Incidentally the 30% off might mean that choosing a Pro plan + extra usage versus Max plan might make sense for more people)
The actual rules now are pretty confusing though. De jure illegal, de facto tolerated -- they'll just auto-detect and bill you for it.
The claude -p situation, though, confuses me. This one's technically legal but against the spirit of the law. (I think made illegal a few weeks ago since it was being used as a workaround for the OpenClaw ban, and seems to have been re-legalized now?)
But they can only extra-bill you for it if they can somehow detect it as invoked by OpenClaw, etc., right? If it's your own harness, it slips thru the cracks? ._.
They always reveal their cards in the most clumsy ways possible. Their enterprise API numbers must be godlike for the way they are treating B2C customers.
"Failed to sign in. Message: This service has been disabled in this account for violation of Terms of Service. Please submit an appeal to continue using this product."
That erosion pushed me to try Codex. I signed up for their most expensive pro plan. Now I'm about to experiment with Kimi. I'm not saying they're better (well, sometimes they are). But here's the thing - what Anthropic did is they made me look. They made a loyal customer start shopping around. And I think that's the worst thing you can do.
Having said that - as an LLM provider for my product, we're staying with Claude. I still trust in their ethics. Please don't prove me wrong.
I have had some ideas for a custom harness (like embedding some tools OOTB and replacing slow tooling) but these policies throw me off. Instead I use local models.
Problem is API costs are insane. I have toyed with the idea of running a local model that works with Claude Sonnet or even Haiku, and I know this has been done by others.
The agent model breaks the power-user/casual-user proportion that makes the existing saas-like pricing work.
Use something else.
