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That's malicious and I think this is scamming from the literal money (you didn't do anything wrong, you executed one command and they scammed you out of the fair usage you paid for).

Please raise the ticket or at least GitHub issue for visibility.

Sooner or later some sort of complaint to the relevant trade authority should happen - this is a scam operation at this point.

ifwinterco 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

At this point everyone doing these kind of flows (using claws or any other flows that run agents in a loop 24/7) using any kind of subscription-based billing for inference must be aware they're on borrowed time.

Enough people have gone over the economics - you're costing OpenAI/Anthropic money, potentially a lot of money, so it's inevitable that sooner or later that particular party will come to an end.

Having said that, doing it by running a regex on your prompts to look for keywords is a bit loose

halJordan a few seconds ago | parent | next [-]

[delayed]

AlotOfReading a minute ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The demo above uses the prompt "hi". The openclaw string is in the git history, which Claude goes looking for.

AstroBen 4 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The only reasonable thing to do if you care about the longevity of your workflow is to build it around open-weight models.

If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.

kenmacd 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> scamming from the literal money

That's par the course for Anthropic. I added some money to my account before I really had a use case for product. A year later they said my money had expired and when I contacted support they basically told me to pound sand.

This while they have the audacity to list one of their corporate values as 'Be good to our users'. They'll never get another dollar from me.

intrasight an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No. Hanlon's razor applies here.

b00ty4breakfast an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You lose little by assuming malicious intent when it comes to billion-dollar tech companies and your money. They can prove otherwise by remedying the situation.

tedivm 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

When it comes to understanding large organizations I think a simple principle should apply:

The Purpose of a System is What it Does[1].

Whether malicious or not, the system does what it does. If people wanted it to do something else they would change the system. The reality is that when corporations make mistakes that benefit them those mistakes rarely get fixed without some sort of public outcry, turning the "mistake" into a "feature".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

pfortuny 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not to corporations, no. You do not need to be charitable to a corporation.

bryanrasmussen 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ok, how is this adequately explained by stupidity?

If it is adequately explained by stupidity then you should be able to get it to display the same behavior without mentioning OpenClaw? Do you have any theory as to what stupid thing they have done to make this happen, non-maliciously? Because, Hanlon's razor doesn't just work by saying Hanlon's razor - you have to actually explain how the stupidity happened.

conartist6 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What you do shows what you value. This clearly wasn't a mistake on the part of Anthropic. Time has shown that. They made the call based on what they believe in

grayhatter 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gross negligence is malicious.

an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
michaelmrose 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

It does not. I would be fairly magical the most favorable interpretation that makes sense is that its supposed to disconnect but also taking your money is a defect.

kitsune1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

wotsdat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

otterley 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are many possible explanations for this outcome to have occurred other than malice. If you're an engineer by trade, consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend. Probably a lot.

How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

rv64imafdc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There's been a sustained pattern of incidents. If Anthropic were truly serious about not wanting to take people's money, then they would have put in place whatever review processes were necessary to stop this from happening. So regardless of whether or not they specifically intend to cause harm, they're willingly letting it happen, which is just about as bad.

Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.

loloquwowndueo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even with the best of faiths, this is at the very least a shoddily vibe coded “detect and low-key block attempts to use Claude for Openclaw” - it decided to look for specific strings wrapped in json without realizing this doesn’t always imply it’s an actual payload for Openclaw itself. And the human driving it was too dumb to review/catch this bad inplementation.

So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers.

(I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)

teiferer 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

> was too dumb to review

Yolo ship it! Move fast and break things. Reviewing just slows everybody down. Nobody can keep up with those coding agents output any longer.

/s

rohansood15 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am engineer by trade. If I pushed an update which wrongly busted my customer's usage limits at a trillion dollar company, I would expect to get fired. Alongside my EM.

jonahx 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Regardless of your expectations (I'm not criticizing them), that is just not how it works at most American companies. Especially not for your manager.

rohansood15 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

You're right. They'd prefer to fire 7% of their team that did nothing wrong instead.

sumeno 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

Did Anthropic announce layoffs that I missed?

skywhopper 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

They will by next year.

michaelmrose 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would expect someone would be critiqued to avoid it re-occurring and the persons money to be refunded. A company which fires so trivially will quickly flush institutional knowledge and team cohesion along with eating substantial recruitment costs.

28 minutes ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
colechristensen 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This is not how any engineering workplace anywhere operates.

rohansood15 12 minutes ago | parent [-]

There are more software engineers outside the first-world than there are within.

grayhatter 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend.

Through some amount of carelessness that ended up costing people money? 0.

Maybe 1 if you want to count the automated monthly charging system that did over charge (extra erroneous charges for the same month) a handful of clients too many times. I noticed before anyone else did, and all of those 1am charges were reversed before 4am. So I don't think that one counts because it was a boring bug that would have been very bad if I wasn't paying attention.

Incompetence to the point of negligence can reasonably be considered malicious. If you're an engineer by trade, you have an ethical and professional responsibility to make sure things like this can't happen. And then, when bugs introduce said complications, fixing them, and remediating the damage.

throwaw12 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

How about Anthropic turn down the heat and refunds money to everyone for every bug it created with its LLM?

an hour ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
ceejayoz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.

otterley 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

I agree that their support is abysmal, and that is intentional. It's unfortunate that the greater market doesn't seem to care that much right now.

bad_haircut72 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah they probably just typed in "Hey Claude, figure out a way to get our inference spend under control - no mistakes!" and shipped it

gjsman-1000 an hour ago | parent [-]

Also they ain't wrong. In what other context does OpenClaw get mentioned?

"You may not use our service if you mention OpenClaw" is a harsh line but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction (i.e. no use allowed for high-stakes financial modeling). Don't like it, cancel your plan.

rv64imafdc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> is a harsh line

But that's the thing -- there is no line! Where is this specified? How can we know what service restrictions there are? For all I know, my plan could be exhausted at any point during the workday just because I happened to touch on some keyword Anthropic has decided to ban.

> Don't like it, cancel your plan.

Ah, but I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity? That the arbitrary enclosure of the collective intelligence was for our own good? These concepts are not compatible.

vel0city an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity?

Tbh blocking OpenClaw might just be for the betterment of humanity. It's yet to be proven either way.

gjsman-1000 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

When you signed up, you agreed you understood the line - which is whatever Anthropic decides the line is. Legally, the line hasn't changed at all, nor has your moral position relative to Anthropic. Don't like it, cancel, but it was always the deal.

This is, by the way, the same legal principle that the website you are posting on, right now, uses. Some uses are prohibited. Not every line need be explicit. You aren't allowed to smack talk Y Combinator or the moderators without possibly being banned for life, and you certainly do not have a legal case if they do.

StilesCrisis 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Do you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason?

People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.

bachmeier 22 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Do you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason?

> People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.

Unfortunately, in the US, they can. I'm not a lawyer working in this area, but my understanding is that companies are in general free to stop doing business with any customer at any time (other than reasons like the race of the customer). And in this type of transaction, there is no obligation to give a refund when they cut off the business relationship. This is different from a business-to-business contract or other types of contracts. This type of sale you're generally out of luck if the business cuts you off. That's why Amazon can delete the music library they sold you and give you no compensation.

echoangle 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

They can not prolong the contract but obviously they still have to provide the service you already paid for. Imagine paying for 1 year of Netflix and one week later Netflix decides to cut you off. Does that make sense?

echoangle 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If you’re paying for it, they can’t just arbitrarily deny you service for made up reasons. I would cancel, but then I would also charge back my payment I’m not getting my promised service for.

otterley 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

Sure they can. But they have to refund your money.

grayhatter 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction

Intentionally (or negligently) anti-competitive behavior is illegal in the US.

> Don't like it, cancel your plan.

Don't like being abused by a company? Just pretend it's not happening! Anyone else exactly as smart as you were, they deserve to be cheated out of their money too!

macNchz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are plenty of ways you could wind up with a git commit containing "OpenClaw" despite zero interaction with OpenClaw itself...adding a blog post to a static site repo, or even a clause in your own app's ToS disallowing use of OpenClaw with your API.

teiferer 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Somebody elses repo that you cloned can contain lots of fun things.

Dylan16807 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a lot of people making tools for coding with LLMs and those have a high chance of mentioning OpenClaw somewhere.

skywhopper 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Where is this restriction documented?

nickthegreek an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the stealing of $200 here? More non malice?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...

otterley 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Last I heard, the money is being refunded.

Jcampuzano2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This would have been easy to say if it was the first time it or something similar happened.

But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.

NetOpWibby an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nuance? Ignorance vs malice? You think too highly of folks.

skywhopper 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah, however this was implemented this was a clear and obvious probable side effect. If they want to block the access at the mention of openclaw, that’s silly but mostly harmless, but why charge extra for an ambiguous case? At best that’s incredibly lazy, which for a company with as much money, influence, and power as Anthropic, is equivalent to malice.

verdverm 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is not the first, nor likely last, of behavior like this.

My personal story is that I bought $50 of credit into their system, didn't use it all that much, and then after a year had gone by they kept the leftovers. I consider that a kind of theft.

an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
teiferer 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well this regex nonsense was likely vibe coded. If it escaped quality checks then this is a testament to how dangerous things coming out of Anthropic are, but not in the scifi sense that their CEO tries to make everybody believe.

surgical_fire an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How about no?

Why should we coddle a corporations when they screw over customers?

It matters very little if they did this out of incompetence or malice.