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

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

According to the email client shared on Hacker NewsAnthropic said that starting at noon Pacific on April 4 (today), subscribers “will no longer use your Claude subscription limits for third-party horses including OpenClaw.” Instead, they will need to pay for additional usage through a “pay-as-you-go method offered separately from your subscription.”

The company said that while it’s starting with OpenClaw today, the policy is “applicable to all third-party tools and will be released soon.”

Anthropic Director of Claude Code Boris Cherny wrote on X that “company registrations are not designed to be used by third-party tools” and that Anthropic is now trying “Having the goal of managing our growth so that we can continue to serve our customers for the long term.”

The announcement comes after OpenClaw developer Peter Steinberger said he was to enter the Anthropic OpenAI competitionand OpenClaw continues as an open source project supported by OpenAI.

Steinberger wrote that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to speak clearly in Anthropic” but were only able to delay the price hike for a week.

“Funny how times go, first they take some of the popular stuff in their closed corners, then they close the open source,” Steinberger said.

Cherny, however, he insisted that the members of the Claude Code team are “big fans of open source” and that he himself “has made only a few (requests) to advance the OpenClaw project more quickly.”

“This is a technical challenge,” he said, adding that Anthropic is still providing full funding to subscribers. “We don’t know that not everyone has realized that this is not something we support, and we are trying to make it clear and transparent.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI soon turn off his Sora app and animationshe says he may release computer hardware and as part of a larger effort to rethink the success of software developers and businesses that rely heavily on products like Claude Code.