A lot of people have spent a considerable amount of time building out "claude -p" workflows trusting Anthropic because of those same Tweet assurances outside of OpenClaw.

It seems with the new "--bare" flag they are introducing, a huge rug pull is coming as they plan to deprecate -p for unlimited users.

The docs now read:

> "Bare mode skips OAuth and keychain reads. Anthropic authentication must come from ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or an apiKeyHelper in the JSON passed to --settings. Bedrock, Vertex, and Foundry use their usual provider credentials. --bare is the recommended mode for scripted and SDK calls, and will become the default for -p in a future release."

Hope I am reading this wrong or this is clarified.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/headless

I've commented elsewhere about just having simple rate limits tied to oauth tokens. This should not be that hard.

There is one simple policy: Subscriptions are for use on human scale of comprehension. API Keys are for everything else.

Anthropic can have a machine/bot get rate limited and people can build workflows using `claude -p` or something even better (like an SDK) , all the while using their OAuth tokens for max/pro.

Peter, while we are on the subject of clarifying what is and isn't allowed I have a question: has OpenAI clearly communicated about precisely where one is supposed to be able to use their Codex quota? For instance, as far as I understand, it is allowed to use it with OpenClaw, but does it extend to any other coding harness? Say I have an app (potentially a paid one) and want my users to use their Codex quota in it, is it permitted to do? As you can probably imagine that would unlock a lot of uses cases given smaller actors can't subsidize as much token costs, but unfortunately, and maybe expectedly due to the nature of subscriptions, I have not been able to find any answer regarding this.

Looks like they are trying to correct course now, but they’ve already lost the trust, and with the new lower limits, it’s probably not worth using it in OpenClaw

Claude CLI has a server mode - am I missing something here, or could we all just claude --server and let openclaw use claude via a2a?

thank you for your commitment to open source.

I mean surely you can understand the the difficulty of their position, right? It's as if Waymo offered a subsidized, subscription based plan that models a certain type of ridership as typical but then people start scheduling rides on a timer with no one in it, far outside the original use case of "Get me from point A to point B". And of course the line between what is acceptable is quite fuzzy. You could imagine it being seen as okay to send a rider-less Waymo to pick up groceries occasionally - but not to schedule one every single day at 4:30PM to pick up a single ice cream cone.

You can argue that this is unfair and they should provide clearer guidance. Well - as soon as they do people find ways to skirt the letter of the rules to once again take advantage of the economics of the subscription model. So should they just scrap the entire plan? Ruin it for people who are using it as it was intended (coding agent, light experimentation/headless use outside of that)? That doesn't seem right either.

Anthropic changing what you get for your subscription week to week is why I would never spend beyond a hobby-tier license. Great product. Probably. But maybe depending on what hours of the day you use it. If it suits them.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am that there are many capable open weight models in the wild to keep a ceiling on bad behavior.

The poor communication and flip-flopping are what concern me.

How can I buy into an ecosystem that might disallow one of my main workflows? I currently use several hook scripts to route specific work to different models. Will they disallow that at some point? We don't know because they can't get their story straight.

They really need to figure out the rules, look I'd love to use a custom harness with Claude Code that I can extend, or build my own (which I'm doing) and use it with my Claude Code license, I don't want to overspend on tokens if I can help it. They really need to set their bar for the next model releases to use less tokens, or to trim their own cost for how these models are run. I'd be okay with a slightly slower experience with Claude Code if it meant similar throughput, but less cost, especially if I can build my own harness for it.

I don’t get why people are so surprised. Didn’t they learn anything from Twitter APIs and the like. The APIs are open as long as they serve the short term problem then Anthropic builds the features people actually use (more or less) and ban the usage of APIs for competing clients

I think a good corollary idea to "vibe coding" is the "vibe product". There is so much stuff popping in and out of existence and my excitement has declined.

There's a technical reason the stance is so vague. Claude CLI works if you reuse its session token, works behind ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, works wrapped in a shell script. Anthropic sees the same telemetry either way. To draw a firm line they'd have to cap what the CLI does, or ship a policy file the tooling can actually check, and both are a real investment. I read the current fog as them being honest about that rather than being evasive. It's still annoying.

I have no trouble believing that all labs are trying really hard to come up with an enticing bundle of something works for a wide variety of users, but it's hard to anticipate the popularity of something like OpenClaw, which completely blows through all previous usage patterns at population level.

It seems like a tall order to set lasting rules in this space at this point, where nobody really understands what is going to happen in a few weeks.

Same building on their API. You design around what you think is allowed, then a blog post shifts everything. A proper developer policy page would fix this.

> Until then, it's hard to know where you stand with using their products.

Working As Designed, clearly.

They probably decreased the cost and limited these external calls

> Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.

Best and most applicable typo ever ʕ ´ • ᴥ •̥ ` ʔ

This is such a strange way for this to be announced. Why is openclaw telling us this? I wouldn't even trust it until Anthropic says so themselves.

The most recent Anthropic announcement was not that people would be banned for using subscriptions with OpenClaw, but that it would be charged as extra usage. I think the reason this was changed three days after that announcement is that being charged for extra usage meant people would not be banned for using their subscription OAuth tokens directly against the Anthropic API with a third party harness, as they had been before. But rather both that usage, and the more recent claude -p usage both be charged as extra usage.

I don't see anything on this page that claims something different from that, or that addresses that claim at all.

Been building atmita.com for this. Every automation has its own model dropdown, so if a provider changes terms you swap that one run to another without rewriting. Claude and GPT side by side right now, more coming.

They need to stop announcing this on freaking Twitter and make a formal announcement on their blog, this is ridiculous and unprofessional. Make a policy decision and stick to it, and dictate how alternative harnesses should work.

> until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything.

Oh no. They won't update the policy. Boris or Thariq will casually mention in a random off-hand commebt on Twitter that this is banned now, and then will gaslight everyone that this has always been the case.

> Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity

I remember when I’d periodically rage quit from Uber One to Lyft Pink and back again every time I had a terrible customer-service experience. In the end, I realized picking a demon and getting familiar with its quirks was the better way to go.

I’m currently sticking with Claude, in part because I’m not exposed to this nonsense due to OpenClaw, in larger part because of the Hegseth-Altman DoD nonsense. More broadly, however, I’m not sure if any of Google, Anthropic or OpenAI are coming across as stars in AI communication and customer service.

you know how s bunch of IT people are trying to "escape the permanent underclass" well it seems like anyone building their tools on cloud providers is doing the opposite. theyre willingly bexoming the underclass in hopes it trickles down

No, it's just that it's confusing, because there are two ways of using Claude Code credentials:

1. Take the oauth credentials and roll your own agent -- this is NOT allowed

2. Run your agentic application directly in Claude Code -- this IS allowed

When OpenClaw says "Open-Claw style CLI usage", it means literally running OpenClaw in an official Claude Code session. Anthropic has no problems with this, this is compliant with their ToS.

When you use Claude Code's oauth credentials outside of the claude code cli Anthropic will charge you extra usage (API pricing) within your existing subscription.

I think this is consistent with the Anthropic announcement. I do not see anything on this page that says it will NOT be charged as extra usage.

The most recent Anthropic announcement was not that people would be banned for using subscriptions with OpenClaw, but that it would be charged as extra usage. I think the reason this was changed three days after that announcement is that being charged for extra usage meant people would not be banned for using their subscription OAuth tokens directly against the Anthropic API with a third party harness, as they had been before. But rather both that usage, and the more recent claude -p usage both be charged as extra usage.

> No official statement and not even a tweet?

Release notes and announcements are a well-known agentic anti-pattern.

If you're doing them, you're doing agentic wrong. /s-ish-also-cry

This is called FUD, amplify negativity, silence positivity

Boiling the frog is an art form. You've got to know when to turn up the heat and when to let it simmer.

If you want LLMs to continue to be offered we have to get to a point where the providers are taking in more money than they are spending hosting them. And we still aren't there (or even close).

Would you please think of the shareholders

It's almost like they want me to switch to the Chinese clones - which they consider malicious actors.

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Aren't they just doing what Hacker News was trying to tell them to do? That AI is useful but not sure if sustainable. Now they're increasing prices and decreasing tokens and you guys are pissed off.

Wait, how?

I had an idea on a whim to vibe-engineer an irccloud replacement for myself.

Started with claude web + Opus 4.7 and continued with Claude Code. Ate up two full cycles of my quota in maybe 6-10 prompts.

Then I iterated on that with pi.dev+codex for HOURS, managed to use 50% of my Codex Pro subscription.

GPT-5.4 brutally consumptive for sure. It's not very verbal, but gpt-5.3 codex is wildly smart about coding & planning, and way way less token hungry.

Consider Z.ai if you need "bulk" usage, GLM is now very good. They still have the occasional API brown out however.

I used to use GLM mostly and had a Claude Pro subscription for occasional review and clean up.

Now I just use GLM.

I do think Claude Max is value for money. But it's more value than I personally need and I like Anthropic less and less.

They said from the beginning it was compute constraint and that OpenClaw was causing way more usage than they could handle

I thought the reason OpenClaw was banned because of the strain it's putting on the systems.

(Well, 3rd party stuff was already illegal, and I believe remains so (sorta-kinda tolerated now? with the extra usage[0]) but enforcement seemed to be based on excessive usage of subs.)

Doing the same thing but with 50K of irrelevant, proprietary system prompt, doesn't seem to improve the situation!

i.e. my question here is: if you replicate OpenClaw with `claude -p prooompt` and cron, is Anthropic happy? (Or perhaps their hope is that the people able and willing to do that represent a rounding error, which is probably true.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633568

Well when the middleman between you and your users is bought out by the competitor, it makes sense to move away from it. It's a bit like Apple selling iPhones in a Microsoft store.

What does your Claude Code implementation of OpenClaw look like?

I’ve been using Codex Pro since they lobotomized Opus 4.6. Codex is so much better, GPT 5.4 xhigh fast is definitely the smartest and fastest model available.

For a while there I had both Opus 4.6 and Codex access and I frequently pitted them against each other, I never once saw Opus come out ahead. Opus was good as a reviewer though, but as an implementer it just felt lazy compared to 5.4 xhigh.

One feature that I haven’t seen discussed that much is how codex has auto-review on tool runs. No longer are you a slave to all or nothing confirmations or endless bugging, it’s such a bad pattern.

Even in a week of heavy duty work and personal use I still haven’t been able to exhaust the usage on the $200 plan.

I’ll probably change my mind when (not IF) OpenAI rug pull, but for spring ‘26, codex is definitely the better deal.

I left anthropic a while ago because of the similar shenanigans they had earlier. I went with opencode & zen.

I still have their subscription, but am using pi now, mainly because something happened that made my opencode sessions unusable (cannot continue them, just blanks out, I assume something in the sqlite is fucked), and I cannot be bothered to debug it.

For what I use the agents, the Chinese models are enough

I also cancelled my 20x and switched to Codex. At this point even the Codex CLI seems to perform better than Claude Code... And so far I'm on the OpenAI Pro plan and haven't even needed to upgrade to their $100/mo plan. I'm getting more value for almost 10x cheaper.

I switched to Droid+Opus (with Claude Max) many months ago and it was my favorite combo.

Had to stop because they don't like us proxying requests anymore.

I've been on pi for a few months now, build a custom tmux plugin so i can use nested pi and mix and match codex / claude instances.

pi has been the better harness out of all the ones i tried, first and third party.

Ever since the Anthropic block i've just canceled all my claude subs. Used to be codex was a bit worse, now they're practically equal. Claude is slightly better at directing other agents but the difference is too minor and not worth the money.

Claude usage limits / costs are absurd.

Any 'principles' people praise anthropic for are not that relevant to me anyways because i'm not a US citizen.

My experience is the opposite of this thread's consensus. Context: Full time SWE, working on large and messy codebase. Not working on crazy automations, working on fixing bugs, troubleshooting crashes, implementing features.

Anthropic models write much better code, they are easy to follow, reasonable and very close to what I would done if I had the time... OpenAI's on the other hand generate extremely complex solutions to the simplest problems.

I was so disappointed by non-Anthropic models, that for a couple of weeks I only used Anthropic models, but based on this thread, I'll go back and give it another try. It's good to go back and try things again every couple of weeks.

Of course, I was annoyed that they lobotomized 4.6, the difference was day and night, and Anthropic is certainly not a company I trust. In my opinion, it shows their willingness to rugpull, so I'm looking at other approaches. Since 4.7, things went back to normal, things you'd expect to work just work.

(Disclosure: I work on tamer, an OSS supervisor for coding agents — biased.) Add one more to the count. The OAuth-across-harnesses idea would help, but it doesn't fix the shape of the problem. "Harness" has always felt off to me. Exoskeleton is closer — Claude Code, Codex, opencode wrap the model and augment it from the inside. What's missing is a layer above that's explicitly not an exoskeleton: a thin supervisor. A master that watches and guides, nothing more. It just relays I/O and hands approval back to the human.

Same, I am from 5x plan and cancel and switched to codex as I want to use Pi.

> I wonder how many other people recently did the same.

Some negative signal for better overall view on things: I'm still with Anthropic and will probably stay with them for the foreseeable future.

I think after DoD/DoW shenanigans (which in of itself felt like a reasonable take on the part of Anthrpic) they got a bunch of visibility and new users, so them hitting some scaling limits is pretty much inevitable - so some service disruption is inevitable. Couple this with the tokenizer changes and seeming decrease in model performance (adaptive thinking etc.), and lots of people will be rightfully pissed off, alongside increased downtime (doesn't matter that much for me, definitely does matter for anything time-sensitive).

At the same time, in practice I've only seen it do stupid things across 8 million tokens about 5 times (confusing user/assistant roles, not reading files that should be obvious for a given use case, and picking trivially wrong/stupid solutions when planning things), alongside another 4 times that tests/my ProjectLint tool caught that I would have missed. The error rate is still arguably lower than mine, though I work in a very well known and represented domain (webdev with a bunch of DevOps and also some ML stuff, and integration with various APIs etc.).

At the same time, the 85 EUR they gave to me for free has been enough to weather the instability in regards to pricing changes and peak usage. They've fixed most of the issues I had with Claude Code (notably performance), and the sub-agent support is great and it's way better than OpenCode in my experience. They also keep shipping new features that are pretty nice, like Dispatch and Routines and Design, those features also seem nice and not like something completely misdirected, so that's nice. The Opus 4.7 model quality with high reasoning is actually pretty nice as well and works better than most of the other models I've tried (OpenAI ones are good, I just prefer Claude phrasing/language/approaches/the overall vibe, not even sure what I'd call it exactly, all the stuff in addition to the technical capabilities).

At the same time, if they mess too much with the 100 USD tier, I bet I could go to OpenAI or try out the GLM 5.1 subscription without too many issues. For now they're replacing all the other providers for me. Oh also I find the subscription vs API token-based payment approach annoying, but I guess that's how they make their money.

Because the Harness is the Moat and key IP not the Models themselves that is the why! now for both OpenAI and Anthropic with all their money raised and the compute they acquire and have in the books of course no one can easily replicate, whom can afford all those datacenters and Nvidia GPUs interconnected is why OpenAI throws you a bone and gives you an Open Source SDK Harness but not the one they actually use for ChatGPT. But now both of them have to deliver and do all the bull-shet they said this models can do... truth is they cannot. So now the bubbles burst and we will see what happens. We all have to buy iPhones or MacBooks so that makes sense, we all use Chrome or Google Search, Instagram, TikTok.

All these models and agents are shortcuts for all of us to be lazy and play games and watch YouTube or Netflix because we use them to work-less, well the party will be over soon.

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Same thing happened to me in January. Never heard back from them after submitting the google form. A few weeks ago I went through the subscription flow again and the 'account disabled' message was no longer there. Didn't go through with the payment so it's possible I would have been blocked at that point but it looked like my account had been re-enabled. I think you just have to play the waiting game unfortunately.

The way I read the Anthropic docs, it seems the term plan is to block the usage of OAuth credentials with the "Claude Agent SDK".

This URL: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

Says this: "Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead."

Again, it seems Anthropic prefers to bill API token rates (long run), not subscriber effective token rates.

You don't really need to tmux at all for Claude Code CLI. Claude Code CLI supports streaming json input, and streaming json output; you can use stdin/out as a pipe to control Claude Code CLI.

I'm doing this today in https://github.com/Cidan/ask -- works great.

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Many people likely objected to the original restriction because it seemed as though Anthropic was trying to impede the development of competing tools.

If I'm paying for compute, why should it matter whether I use Anthropic's harness (e.g., Claude Code) or a 3rd-party harness?

Yes, exactly.

(That's implied by the sitename to the right of the title)

And then recommends to use an API key, which as far as I know was never restricted, it was trying to use the subscription that was prohibited/limited.

I'm confused by the comments being full of people swearing off Claude, feels like real HN bubble stuff.

Wow. I’m curious as to why so much spam.

yeah rate limits are the way to go. I don't see how this is not really simple: A human can only type or tts the text in and read responses only so fast, anthropic can use this as a baseline. They can create a client that can back off(rate limit) and wait, like for something like when a user says something like "spawn 10 processes with claude -p to do X" this client can calculate the rate limit and place an event in a queue and developers can use this client's rate-limit and build workflows around it: e.g. a client queue that has a timer event that expires the rate limit that was set can wake up a daemon. There are a million ways to implement the queue <> daemon thingy, its just software at that point.

Since the subscription is hard linked to an OAuth token this should be easy to track too. What am i missing?

What's puzzling or schizophrenic about that? Those seem like two very natural factors that would be in tension with one another and have to be balanced.

Almost seems like business leaders have to balance different aspirations and make tradeoffs. Unbelieveable.

Yes, if it is "extra usage," then that just seems like an API with extra steps.

I'm trying out codex for first time as well cause something up with Claude for sure, 4.7 has been super frustrating. For other models, highly recommend trying MiniMax 2.7, using it with Hermes is actually pretty good, and their token subscription plans include a lot of usage for $10.

Same here. I've been on the Claude Max 20x plan for a while. Now I'm really giving codex a try and looking at the cheaper models as well.

Enshittification 101, codex is undergoing the same thing on a 3 month lag.

Or Claw-like harnesses that we make ourselves? It takes honestly like 15 minutes to roll your own, so I did it thinking "well, hopefully it's not considered third party"

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More people flocked to Codex and found out that it's not worse, and sometimes superior.

ai garbage