Anthropic has announced that Claude Code subscribers will incur additional charges when using third-party tools like OpenClaw. Effective from noon Pacific on April 4, subscribers will no longer be able to utilize their existing Claude subscription limits for usage with third-party harnesses, including OpenClaw. Instead, they will be required to pay for this extra usage through a separate "pay-as-you-go" option, billed independently from their subscription.
The company stated that while OpenClaw is the initial focus, this policy "applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly." Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, explained on X that the company's "subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools," and Anthropic is now striving "to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term."
This announcement follows OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger's recent move to Anthropic rival OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open-source project supported by OpenAI. Steinberger shared that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin "tried to talk sense into Anthropic" but only managed to delay the increased pricing by a week. Steinberger remarked, "Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source."
However, Cherny insisted that Claude Code team members "are big fans of open source," citing his own contributions to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw. He clarified that this decision is primarily about "engineering constraints," adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds for subscribers. "We know not everyone realized this isn’t something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and explicit," he said.
Concurrently, OpenAI recently shut down its Sora app and video generation models. Reports suggest this was done to free up computing resources and align with a broader strategy to refocus on attracting software engineers and enterprises, who are increasingly relying on products such as Claude Code.