Ok I am usually defending Anthropic, but it seems like this OpenClaw and Hermes ban was implemented incredibly poorly; it looks like a simple regex.

Didn’t they think about “we need to make sure Claude Code is never banned” ? Could have been as easy as including some Claude Code specific prompting traits (tools, system prompt, whatever) in there and automatically whitelisting it.

Is it foolproof? No. Will it avoid banning legit users? Absolutely.

First do the first large sweep, then see what still falls through, then ban those.

It really seems they were panicking due to capacity and there was very little oversight with all this.

I’m not affected but pretty disappointed.