The price for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools will soon be higher.
According to a customer email shared with Hacker News, Anthropic said that starting at noon Pacific time today, April 4, subscribers “will no longer be able to use Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses, including OpenClaw.” Instead, you must pay additional usage fees through a “pay-as-you-go option that is billed separately from your subscription.”
Starting today with OpenClaw, the company said the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more harnesses soon.”
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, told X that the company’s “subscriptions were not built around the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” and that Anthropic is now working to “intentionally manage growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably over the long term.”
The announcement comes after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joined Anthropic rival OpenAI and announced that OpenClaw would continue as an open source project with support from OpenAI.
Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Moerin “tried to reason with Anthropic,” but were only able to postpone the price increase for a week.
“Interestingly enough, the timing aligns: First, we copy some of the popular features into a closed harness, and then we lock out open source,” Steinberger said.
tech crunch event
San Francisco, California
|
October 13-15, 2026
However, Cherny claimed that members of the Claude Code team are “huge fans of open source” and that he himself “just introduced some open source.” [pull requests] Specifically to improve OpenClaw’s prompt cache efficiency. ”
“This is more due to technical limitations,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds to subscribers. “We understand that not everyone understands that this is not what we stand for. This is an attempt to make that clear and clear.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI recently reportedly shut down its Sora app and video generation model as part of a broader effort to free up computing resources and refocus on acquiring software engineers and businesses that are increasingly reliant on products like Claude Code.
Source link
