Anthropic Tells Claude Code Users: Pay More to Use OpenClaw

If you’ve been using OpenClaw with your Claude Code subscription, your free ride just ended.

Anthropic quietly informed subscribers this week that starting April 4, they can no longer use their existing Claude subscription limits to power OpenClaw and other third-party tools. Anyone who wants to keep using them will need to sign up for a separate pay-as-you-go plan, on top of what they’re already paying.

The company’s explanation? Their subscriptions were never designed for the kind of heavy usage these third-party tools generate. Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, framed it as a sustainability issue, saying the company needs to be “intentional in managing growth” to keep serving customers long-term.

Not everyone’s buying that.

OpenClaw’s creator Peter Steinberger, who recently joined OpenAI, says he and a board member tried to push back on Anthropic but only managed to buy users an extra week before the change kicked in. He was more blunt about what he thinks is really going on: Anthropic has been quietly copying popular OpenClaw features into its own closed product and is now boxing out the open-source competition.

Anthropic pushed back on that characterization. Cherny pointed out that he personally submitted code improvements to OpenClaw and insisted the move is about engineering constraints, not competitive tactics. The company is also offering full refunds to subscribers who feel blindsided.

Still, the timing hasn’t gone unnoticed, and in a space where open-source credibility matters, the optics aren’t great.