People who subscribe to Claude Pro and Max will no longer be able to use their current subscription limits for third-party automation tools like OpenClaw. Anthropic sent an email to customers saying that third-party harnesses were putting "unprecedented strain" on its infrastructure. The change in policy shows a big disagreement in the industry between AI companies that are making money off of their infrastructure and developers who want open, flat-rate access to the newest models.

openClaw will start enforcing this change, and it will be rolled out to all third-party harnesses in the next few weeks. Developers and power users are very angry about the move. Some people say that Anthropic marketed agentic workflows while also making it harder to build them in the most cost-effective way.

The company has given a one-time credit equal to the cost of a monthly subscription, which can be used by April 17th. It also gives up to 30% off when you buy extra usage bundles. Users who want to keep adding third-party agents to their Claude accounts now have two options: they can enable "extra usage" billing, which is charged separately from their subscription, or they can log in with a standard Claude API key for metered API pricing.

The crackdown happened because this problem was so big. Many people who used Openclaw-plus-Claude workflows now say that the cost of tasks per agent ranges from $0.50 to $2.00, which means that hobbyists and solo developers can't afford to use autonomous agents.