Claude Code subscribers will soon face higher costs when using Anthropic's coding assistant with third-party tools like OpenClaw. An email to customers, later shared online, states that beginning at noon Pacific Time on April 4, subscribers can "no longer use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw." For continued access, they must switch to a separate "pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription."

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The company clarified that while OpenClaw is the initial focus, this new policy "applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly."

Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, explained on social media that the company's "subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools." He stated that Anthropic is now trying "to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term."

This change follows news that OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger is joining rival OpenAI, with OpenClaw continuing as an open-source project supported by OpenAI. Steinberger posted that he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin "tried to talk sense into Anthropic" but only succeeded in delaying the pricing shift by one week. He remarked, "Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source."

Cherny countered this characterization, insisting that Claude Code team members are "big fans of open source" and noting that he personally "just put up a few [pull requests] to improve prompt cache efficiency for OpenClaw specifically." He framed the decision as being "more about engineering constraints," and highlighted that Anthropic is offering full refunds to affected subscribers. "We know not everyone realized this isn't something we support, and this is an attempt to make it clear and explicit," he added.

In a related industry move, OpenAI recently discontinued its Sora app and video generation models. Reports indicate this was done to free up computing resources and refocus efforts on attracting software engineers and enterprises—a key demographic also being courted by products like Claude Code.