Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra to use OpenClaw

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

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

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

Anthropic’s head of division, Claude Code, Boris Cherny wrote on

The announcement comes after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he would join forces with Anthropic competitor OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open source project supported by OpenAI.

Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk some sense into Anthropians” but were only able to delay the price increase by a week.

“It’s funny how the timings match up, they first copy some popular features into their closed tools, then they close open source,” Steinberger said.

However, Cherny insisted that members of the CloudCode team are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “put out a few [pull requests] Specifically to improve the efficiency of OpenClaw’s fast cache.

“It’s more about engineering limitations,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still offering full refunds to subscribers. “We know that not everyone has realized that this is not something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and upfront.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI recently shut down its Sora and video creation app models, both to free up compute resources and as part of a broader effort to refocus on winning software engineers and organizations that increasingly rely on products like Claude Code.