Human reins in unlimited use of AI for OpenClaw subscribers

Anthropic told subscribers over the weekend that they will have to pay for extensive use of Claude AI models to run third-party agents like OpenClaw.

Users with monthly subscriptions can still use Claude’s models, including Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, through third-party agents. But you will have to pay via Anthropic’s API or use the “pay as you go option” which will be billed separately from your Claude subscription payment.

“The $20/month all-you-can-eat buffet just closed,” AI product manager Akash Gupta wrote. On X.

At the same time, Anthropic recently announced new features that bring some of the things that made OpenClaw so popular to Claude himself. Claude can use your computereven if it is not, for example.

Why is this policy important?

There has been growing tension between OpenAI and Anthropic, which has recently flared up over related controversies Contracts With the US Department of Defense. But there is also a tension between users who want to constantly run autonomous AI agents and AI labs that try to control costs by managing the tasks for which their models are used.

Cloud is a chatbot created for humans to request, not for millions of AI agents to use in their workflow. These proxy tools, like Manis and OpenClaw, require much more power to run tokens and burn them faster than regular human chat. Anthropic has already taken steps to meet the demand brought by heavy agent users, such as a five-hour session cap during peak modeling periods.

“We have been working on managing demand across the board, but these tools are putting significant strain on our systems,” Anthropic wrote in its email to customers.

OpenAI has been comprehensive with agent tools. Early this year, I hired an artificial intelligence company Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, with the goal of bringing AI agents to a wide audience. Steinberger was vocal about his criticism of the New Anthropic policy, taking to X over the weekend.

“It’s funny how the timings coincide, first they copy some popular features into their closed tools, then they close open source.” books.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the parent company of CNET, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

The future of agent account power

Friction between heavy agent users and AI companies is likely to increase. These AI tools are extremely powerful: they can work for hours, take actions across apps like Gmail, Slack, and iMessage, and work autonomously for much longer and faster than a human can. Because of this power, they are much more expensive and require much more energy to operate than a human pushing a robot. AI companies will likely increasingly push these computing costs onto heavy users through price increases or steps like those taken by Anthropic.