Anthropic stopped letting Claude subscribers use their included limits through OpenClaw and began charging separately for that traffic at noon on April 4. The company said the pay-as-you-go rule would soon extend to other third-party harnesses. Claude Code chief Boris Cherny argued that subscriptions were designed for different usage patterns and that the change would make growth sustainable. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, who recently joined OpenAI, accused Anthropic of restricting open source after copying popular features. Anthropic offered full refunds.

The separate bill redraws a boundary that users discovered only after building workflows across it. A subscription appeared to buy access to Claude’s capacity, while Anthropic now distinguishes between requests sent through its own interface and requests sent through outside software. The same model and customer acquire a different price when an open-source tool controls the route. Engineering constraints may be real because persistent agents can consume capacity at an unusual rate. Yet metering also gives the model provider leverage over the independent applications growing around it, especially when those applications compete with the provider’s own harness. OpenClaw remains open source, but its usefulness depends on paid access to systems owned elsewhere. Developers can accept the new meter, change providers, or dismantle routines that had treated a subscription as portable. The refund covers the plan, while the work of rebuilding stays with the subscriber.