The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.

Claude Code Now Charges Extra for OpenClaw and Third-Party Tools

Anthropic has changed how Claude Code subscriptions work with third-party tools, and it is going to cost some users more money. Starting April 4, Claude Code subscribers can no longer use their existing subscription allowance when accessing the assistant through OpenClaw or other external platforms. Instead, those interactions will be billed separately on a pay-as-you-go basis, on top of whatever they are already paying for their subscription.

Anthropic’s head of Claude Code Boris Cherny explained the change as an engineering and sustainability issue, saying the company’s subscription model was not designed for the kinds of usage patterns that third-party tools generate. OpenClaw in particular drives significantly heavier usage than the average Claude Code session, and that gap had apparently become unsustainable within the current pricing structure. Anthropic is offering full refunds to subscribers who did not realise this was not covered.

The timing has added an awkward layer to the story. OpenClaw was created by Peter Steinberger, who has since left the project to join OpenAI. OpenClaw continues as an open source project backed by OpenAI, and Steinberger has been vocal about his frustration with Anthropic’s decision. He said he and OpenClaw board member Dave Morin attempted to push back on the change and only managed to delay it by a week. His take is that Anthropic quietly copied popular OpenClaw features into its own closed tool and is now cutting off access to the open source version, a reading Anthropic disputes.

Cherny pushed back on that framing, saying the Claude Code team are genuine supporters of open source and that the decision is about managing infrastructure, not locking out competition. He pointed out that he personally submitted code improvements to OpenClaw to help with its efficiency.

The broader context matters here too. Anthropic is growing fast, Claude Code’s revenue recently crossed $2.5 billion annualised, and managing compute costs at that scale requires hard decisions about what the subscription actually covers.