OpenClaw creator, who Sam Altman hired for millions, reacts to Anthropic banning his AI Agent; says: Tried to talk sense into Anthropic, but …
Anthropic has cut off support for the popular AI agent platform OpenClaw from Claude subscriptions. This comes just days after the entire source code for Anthropic’s Claude Code command line interface application (not the models) leaked and has been disseminated widely on GitHub, apparently due to a serious internal error. Anthropic has publicly acknowledged the leak, terming it ‘human error’. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Claude subscriptions will no longer support third-party tools like OpenClaw starting at 12 p.m. PT on Saturday. “Starting tomorrow at 12pm PT, Claude subscriptions will no longer cover usage on third-party tools like OpenClaw.” He added, “We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API.”“Subscribers get a one-time credit equal to your monthly plan cost. If you need more, you can now buy discounted usage bundles. To request a full refund, look for a link in your email tomorrow. We want to be intentional in managing our growth to continue to serve our customers sustainably long-term. This change is a step toward that.” He told users that they “can still use these tools with your Claude login via extra usage bundles (now available at a discount), or with a Claude API key.”
OpenClaw creator calls the ban ‘Sad’
Replying to this, OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said, “woke up and my mentions are full of these Both me and @davemorin tried to talk sense into Anthropic, best we managed was delaying this for a week. Funny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.”In another post he said that while what Anthropic has done is sad, he gives credit to Cherny for softening the blow. “While I think what Anthropic does is sad for the ecosystem, I wanna give Boris credit for doing what he can to soften the fallout. Today’s release will include some fixes for better cache use, to lower cost for API users,” he wrote. Prior to the news, Anthropic had also begun imposing stricter Claude session limits every 5 hours of usage during business hours (5am-11am PT/8am-2pm ET), meaning that the number of tokens you could send during those sessions dropped. Peter Steinberger was recently hired by OpenAI. Released in November 2025, iOpenClaw is the open-source AI agent that took the developer world by storm and raised concerns among enterprise security teams. In February, Steinberger joined OpenAI.“Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI to drive the next generation of personal agents,” Altman said in a post on X, adding “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support.”Many analysts called OPenClaw’s acquisition by Sam Altman as missed opportunity for Anthropic as OpenClaw was originally built to work on Claude and carries the name — ClawdBot — that is said to have nodded to the model.
