AI / Tech
Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw’s creator from accessing Claude
“Yeah folks, it’s gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models,” OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger posted on X early Friday morning, along with a photo of a message from Anthropic saying his account had been suspended over “suspicious” activity.
The ban didn’t last long. A few hours later, after the post went viral, Steinberger said his account had been reinstated. Among hundreds of comments — many of them in conspiracy theory land, given that Steinberger is now employed by Anthropic rival OpenAI — was one by an Anthropic engineer. The engineer told the famed developer that Anthropic has never banned anyone for using OpenClaw and offered to help.
It’s not clear if that was the key that restored the account. (We’ve asked Anthropic about it.) But the whole message string was enlightening on many levels.
To recap the recent history: this ban followed news last week that subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude would no longer cover “third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” the AI model company said.
OpenClaw users now have to pay for that usage separately, based on consumption, through Claude’s API. In essence, Anthropic, which offers its own agent Cowork, is now charging a “claw tax.” Steinberger said he was following this new rule and using his API, but was banned anyway.
Anthropic said it instituted the pricing change because subscriptions weren’t built to handle the “usage patterns” of claws. Claws can be more compute-intensive than prompts or simple scripts because they may run continuous reasoning loops, automatically repeat or retry tasks, and tie into a lot of other third-party tools.
Steinberger, however, wasn’t buying that excuse. After Anthropic changed the pricing, he posted, “Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.” Though he didn’t specify, he may have been referring to features added to Claude’s agent Cowork, such as Claude Dispatch, which lets users remotely control agents and assign tasks. Dispatch rolled out a couple of weeks before Anthropic changed its OpenClaw pricing policy.
Steinberger’s frustration with Anthropic was again on display Friday.
One person implied that some of this is on him, for taking a job at OpenAI instead of Anthropic, posting “You had the choice, but you went to the wrong one.” To which Steinberger replied: “One welcomed me, one sent legal threats.”
Ouch.
When multiple people asked him why he’s using Claude instead of his employer’s models at all, he explained that he only uses it for testing, to ensure updates to OpenClaw won’t break things for Claude users.
He explained: “You need to separate two things. My work at the OpenClaw Foundation where we wanna make OpenClaw work great for *any* model provider, and my job at OpenAI to help them with future product strategy.”
Multiple people also pointed out that the need to test Claude is because that model remains a popular choice for OpenClaw users over ChatGPT. He also heard that when Anthropic changed its pricing, to which he replied: “Working on that.” (So, that’s a clue about what his job at OpenAI entails.)
Steinberger did not respond to a request for comment.