Overview
- Anthropic, which enforced the change Saturday, now blocks Claude subscriptions from covering tools like OpenClaw and requires extra-usage bundles or API billing, citing engineering constraints.
- Users can still run third-party agents with discounted extra-usage bundles or an API key, but heavy developers face higher costs because usage is now metered rather than capped by a flat plan.
- To ease the switch, Anthropic offered one month of extra usage credit, 30% off extra-usage bundles, and refunds or cancellations, though some subscribers reported refund links did not work.
- OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger criticized the move as shutting out open source, while Anthropic said it supports open-source projects and that agent traffic strains systems built for different workloads.
- Following Monday’s partial outage with elevated errors on Claude.ai and Claude Code, Anthropic said the incident was brief and resolved as it continues to balance rising demand.