{"id":392423,"date":"2026-04-11T00:07:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T00:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/392423\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T00:07:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T00:07:10","slug":"anthropic-temporarily-banned-openclaws-creator-from-accessing-claude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/392423\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic temporarily banned OpenClaw’s creator from accessing Claude"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYeah folks, it\u2019s gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models,\u201d OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger posted on X early Friday morning<\/a>, along with a photo of a message from Anthropic saying his account had been suspended over \u201csuspicious\u201d activity.<\/p>\n

The ban didn\u2019t last long. A few hours later, after the post went viral, Steinberger said his account had been reinstated. Among hundreds of comments \u2014 many of them in conspiracy theory land, given that Steinberger is now employed<\/a> by Anthropic rival OpenAI \u2014 was one by an Anthropic engineer. The engineer told the famed developer that Anthropic has never banned anyone for using OpenClaw and offered to help.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear if that was the key that restored the account. (We\u2019ve asked Anthropic about it.) But the whole message string was enlightening on many levels.<\/p>\n

To recap the recent history: This ban followed news last week that subscriptions to Anthropic\u2019s Claude would no longer cover<\/a> \u201cthird-party harnesses including OpenClaw,\u201d the AI model company said.<\/p>\n

OpenClaw users now have to pay for that usage separately, based on consumption, through Claude\u2019s API. In essence, Anthropic, which offers its own agent, Cowork, is now charging a \u201cclaw tax.\u201d Steinberger said he was following this new rule and using his API but was banned anyway.<\/p>\n

Anthropic said it instituted the pricing change because subscriptions weren\u2019t built to handle the \u201cusage patterns\u201d of claws. Claws can be more compute-intensive<\/a> than prompts or simple scripts because they may run continuous reasoning loops, automatically repeat or retry tasks, and tie into a lot of other third-party tools.<\/p>\n

Steinberger, however, wasn\u2019t buying that excuse. After Anthropic changed the pricing, he posted<\/a>, \u201cFunny how timings match up, first they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.\u201d Though he didn\u2019t specify, he may have been referring to features added to Claude\u2019s Cowork agent, such as Claude Dispatch, which lets users remotely control agents and assign tasks<\/a>. Dispatch rolled out a couple of weeks before Anthropic changed its OpenClaw pricing policy.<\/p>\n

Steinberger\u2019s frustration with Anthropic was again on display Friday. <\/p>\n

One person implied that some of this is on him for taking a job at OpenAI instead of Anthropic, posting, \u201cYou had the choice, but you went to the wrong one.\u201d To which Steinberger replied: \u201cOne welcomed me, one sent legal threats.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

When multiple people asked him why he\u2019s using Claude instead of his employer\u2019s models at all, he explained that he only uses it for testing, to ensure updates to OpenClaw won\u2019t break things for Claude users.<\/p>\n

He explained: \u201cYou need to separate two things. My work at the OpenClaw Foundation where we wanna make OpenClaw work great for *any* model provider, and my job at OpenAI to help them with future product strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Multiple people also pointed out that the need to test Claude is because that model remains a popular choice for OpenClaw users over ChatGPT. He also heard that when Anthropic changed its pricing, to which he replied: \u201cWorking on that.\u201d (So, that\u2019s a clue about what his job at OpenAI entails.)<\/p>\n

Steinberger did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYeah folks, it\u2019s gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models,\u201d OpenClaw…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,4064,61,60,133264,134955,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-392423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-claude","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-openclaw","16":"tag-peter-steinberger","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}