Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage

It’s about to get more expensive for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s Coding Assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools.

According to an email from a customer shared on HackernieuwsAnthropic said that starting April 4 at noon Pacific (today), subscribers will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits on third-party harnesses, including OpenClaw.” Instead, they must pay for additional usage through “a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.”

The company said that while it is starting with OpenClaw today, the policy “applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out soon.”

Anthropic’s head of Claude Code Boris Cherny wrote on X that the company’s “subscriptions were not built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools” and that Anthropic is trying now “to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably over the long term.”

The announcement comes after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he was joining anthropic rival OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open source project with support from OpenAI.

Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic” but were only able to delay the higher prices by a week.

“Funny how the timings match up: first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, and then they exclude open source,” Steinberger said.

Cherny though insisted that Claude Code team members are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “set up just a few [pull requests] to improve fast cache efficiency specifically for OpenClaw.”

“This is more about technical limitations,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds for subscribers. “We know that not everyone realized that this is not something we support, and this is an effort to make it clear and explicit.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI recently retired its Sora app and video generation models, reportedly to free up computing resources and as part of a broader effort to refocus on winning over the software engineers and enterprises that increasingly rely on products like Claude Code.