Claude subscribers will have to pay extra to use OpenClaw

Claude users will now have to pay more to use third-party tools like the viral AI assistant OpenClaw, Anthropic announced.

The news came via email from Anthropic to Claude subscription holders. It was posted on Hacker News and states that as of April 4 at 12 p.m. PT, subscribers will "no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses [tools] including OpenClaw. You can still use them with your Claude account, but they will require extra usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription."

Head of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, said the same on X on Friday, and mentioned these tools can also be used with an API key. He shared an explanation for the change: "We've been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API."

In February, OpenClaw developer Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI after the tool became widely known online. On Friday, Steinberger posted on X that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin "tried to talk sense into Anthropic, best we managed was delaying this for a week."

He continued, "Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source."

Cherny responded to this (though not to Steinberger directly), stating that the Claude team is "big fans of open source," and that this is more about engineering constraints. "Our systems are highly optimized for one kind of workload, and to serve as many people as possible with the most intelligent models, we are continuing to optimize that," he said.

Cherny also added, however, that if users want to cancel subscriptions, Anthropic is giving full refunds.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.