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

For Claude Code subscribers, using Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools is about to become more expensive.

According to customer email Shared on Hacker NewsStarting at noon Pacific on April 4 (today), subscribers “will no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party plugins, including OpenClaw,” Anthropic said. 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 the policy “applies to all third-party attachments and will be rolled out shortly,” though it’s starting with OpenClaw today.

Anthropic’s Claude Code chief Boris Cherny He wrote in X the company’s “subscriptions are not designed for use cases of these third-party tools” and Anthropic is running now “Being intentional about managing our growth to continue to serve our customers in a sustainable way for the long term.”

The revelation came after OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said he was Anthropic challenger joins OpenAIOpenClaw continues to be an open source project with OpenAi support.

Steinberger wrote he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin “tried to talk sense into Anthropic,” but were only able to delay the increased prices for a week.

“It’s funny how the times match up, first they port some popular features to their closed-end trailer, then they lock open source,” Steinberger said.

Cherny, however he insisted Claude said his Code team members were “big fans of open source” and that he had “put in a few (pull requests) to improve operational cache efficiency, especially for OpenClaw.”

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

Meanwhile, recently OpenAI close its Sora app and video creation templatesas part of a broader effort to free up computing resources and focus on winning over software engineers and enterprises that increasingly rely on products like Claude Code.