Anthropic's Claude Code subscribers are facing an impending price increase for utilizing the company's coding assistant in conjunction with OpenClaw and other external third-party tools.
An internal customer email, which surfaced on Hacker News, revealed Anthropic's new policy. Effective today, April 4, at noon Pacific Time, subscribers will no longer be able to apply their existing Claude subscription limits when using "third-party harnesses, including OpenClaw." Instead, any additional usage will necessitate payment through "a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription."
Anthropic clarified that while OpenClaw is the initial focus of this change, the policy "applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly," indicating a broader implementation across other external integrations.
Boris Cherny, Anthropic's Head of Claude Code, addressed the change on X, stating that the company's "subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools." He further elaborated that Anthropic is committed to "be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term."
This policy shift follows recent news that Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI, a direct competitor to Anthropic. Steinberger confirmed that OpenClaw will persist as an open-source project, now benefiting from support from OpenAI.
Steinberger publicly shared that he, alongside OpenClaw board member Dave Morin, "tried to talk sense into Anthropic," but their efforts only succeeded in postponing the implementation of the increased pricing by one week.
He critically observed the timing, remarking, "Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source."
Conversely, Cherny firmly stated that the Claude Code team members are "big fans of open source," even highlighting his personal contribution by submitting "a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically."
He attributed the change to "engineering constraints," further assuring subscribers that Anthropic is providing full refunds. Cherny concluded, "We know not everyone realized this isn’t something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and explicit."
In a related development, Anthropic's rival, OpenAI, recently discontinued its Sora application and video generation models. This move was reportedly aimed at reallocating computing resources and forms part of a larger strategic initiative to intensify focus on attracting software engineers and enterprises, segments that are increasingly adopting advanced coding assistants such as Claude Code.
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