Anthropic’s coding assistant, Claude Code, is set to become more costly for subscribers who utilise third-party tools such as OpenClaw. Effective from noon Pacific time on April 4, subscribers will no longer be able to integrate their Claude subscription limits with external applications. Instead, users must opt for an additional “pay-as-you-go” payment model that is separate from their existing subscription.
The company announced that this change initially affects OpenClaw but will soon extend to all third-party tools. Anthropic’s Boris Cherny explained that the subscription model was not designed to accommodate the usage patterns of these external tools and emphasised the importance of managing growth sustainably for long-term customer service.
This announcement follows news that Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, has moved to Anthropic’s competitor, OpenAI, while OpenClaw continues as an open-source initiative supported by OpenAI. Steinberger noted that he and board member Dave Morin attempted to reason with Anthropic regarding the pricing changes but were only able to postpone the increase for a week. He remarked on the timing of the announcement, suggesting that it aligns with Anthropic adopting features from OpenClaw into their proprietary harness while sidelining open-source alternatives.
Cherny defended the company’s decision, asserting that the Claude Code team supports open source, and indicated that the changes are driven by engineering limitations. He also mentioned that full refunds are available for affected subscribers, acknowledging that not all users were aware of the limitations on third-party tool support.
Moreover, in the same vein of shifting resources, OpenAI has recently discontinued its Sora app and video generation models, purportedly to streamline computing resources and refocus efforts on capturing the interest of software engineers and enterprises that rely heavily on tools like Claude Code.
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