Looks like this was restored 2 weeks ago[0], 3 days after Anthropic said OpenClaw requires extra usage[1]. At this point, it's hard to take this seriously. No official statement and not even a tweet?
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.
But... Even when running it in mode 2 ("claude -p") they at certain points tried to detect OpenClaw-usage based prompts made, and blocked them [0]. Now OpenClaw says that Antrophic sanctions this as allowable again.
I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously.
I have never heard of this, and cannot be reproduced, and is not according to Anthropic's ToS. And there's a lot of FUD being spread around.
They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most).
> This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code.
> OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.
If Openclaw was still using Claude Code as the harness, I don't know how to reconcile that with "Openclaw is based on the pi framework", which is decidedly NOT claude code.
From what I understand, they still had the Claude Code harness available, but were mostly fully integrated on the pi agent framework, using Claude Code's oauth credentials directly,
Openclaw allows you to effectively “shell out” to another harness for your model calls, while still using Pi as your main agentic harness. This is the claude -p workflow. Tools and skills are injected into Claude and they hack session persistence into it as well.
They also absolutely blocked OpenClaw system prompts from this path in the prior weeks, based purely on keyword detection. Seems they’ve undone that now.
No, if you ran Openclaw using Anthropic API as a provider, or had it use the ‘claude -p’ cli interface, you got an email from Anthropic threatening a ban unless you upgraded billing.
This was widely reported, and happened to me. You probably can’t reproduce it or see it in docs because they seem to have changed the policy.
> Anthropic staff told us OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again
Anthropic staff have had contradictive statements in Twitter and have corrected each other. Their intent for clarifications lead to confusion.
> OpenClaw treats Claude CLI reuse and claude -p usage as sanctioned for this integration unless Anthropic publishes a new policy.
Oh cool, so everything is back to business now, until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything.
Anthropic have proved themselves to be be unreliable when it comes to CC. Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.
It's the PayPal model of customer service: they'll ban you at any time for any reason or none at all, but if you're very nice they might be willing to have a human look at that decision at some point, but probably not.
They had this on here since day 1 of the block. This is just Openclaw saying "if you run Openclaw inside Claude Code, it's compliant with the Anthropic ToS", because, well, it's literally running inside Claude Code.
What's not allowed is grabbing the oauth tokens and using these for your own custom agent, which is what was (and still is) banned.
Nothing has changed, this appears to just be a giant misunderstanding (and probably a poor choice of words from Openclaw).
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
> 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.
Anthropic is really trying to burn all that goodwill they worked up by raising prices, reducing limits and making it impossible to know what the actual policies are.
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).
The open models may not be as great but maybe these are good enough. AI users can switch when the prices rise before it becomes sustainable for (some) of the large LLM providers.
Currently it costs so much more to host an open model than it costs to subscribe to a much better hosted model. Which suggests it’s being massively subsidised still.
They probably aren’t planning on making the money on consumer subscriptions. Any price is viable as long as the user can get more value out of it than they spend.
Somethings not adding up. Why is Amazon making financial plans for the next decade based on continued OpenAI spending but you’re saying AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even close to being profitable, so how can they last a decade or more?
That's the interesting question, right? Because if this unwinds during a period of external inflation (say, because of a big war and energy shortage) then even the Bernanke would say helicopter money won't work
A guy from Meta interviewing at BBC a few years ago claimed that every school child in India was going to have the metaverse VR or they'd be left behind in their education, so every family was certainly going to pony up the money.
I see the current situation as a plus. I get SOTA models for dumping prices. And once the public providers go up with their pricing, I will be able to switch to local AI because open models have improved so much.
What shareholders, Anthropic is a money burning pit. Not to the same extent as OpenAI, but both will struggle hard to actually turn a profit some day, let alone make back the massive investments they've received.
Not that they don't bring value, I'm just not convinced they'll be able to sell their products in a sticky enough way to make up the prices they'll have to extract to make up for the absurd costs.
>> both will struggle hard to actually turn a profit some day, let alone make back the massive investments they've received.
I'd agree with you, except I've heard this argument before. Amazon, Google, Facebook all burned lots of cash, and folks were convinced they would fail.
On the other hand plenty burned cash and did fail. So could go either way.
I expect, once the market consolidates to 2 big engines, they'll make bonkers money. There will be winners and losers. But I can't tell you which is which yet.
I’m not sure there will be consolidation. There’s too much room for specialization and even when the models are trained to do the same task they have very different qualities and their own strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just swap one for the other. If anything, as hardware improves I’d expect even more models and providers to become available. There’s already an ocean of fine tuned and merged models.
$20B ARR or so reported added in Q1 doesn’t sound particularly bad, they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer. The issue is they’re compute constrained on the supply side to grow faster…
> $20B ARR or so reported added in Q1 doesn’t sound particularly bad
Unless you compare with the reported cash burn or projected losses.
> they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer
But the problem is, they have no moat. Even if Claude diffuses into the economy (still to be seen how much it can effectively penetrate sectors other than engineering, spam, marketing/communications), there is no moat, all providers are interchangeable. If Antrhopic raise the prices too much, switch out to the OpenAI equivalent products.
I disagree very strongly with this, both anecdotally and in the data - subscriptions are growing in all frontier providers; anecdata is right here in HN when you look around almost everyone is talking about CC, codex is a distant second, and completely anecdotally I personally strictly prefer GPT 5.3+ models for backend work and Opus for frontend; Gemini reviews everything that touches concurrency or SQL and finds issues the other models miss.
My general opinion is that models cannot be replaceable, because a model which can replace every other provider must excel at everything all specialist models excel at and that is impossible to serve at scale economically. IOW everyone will have at least two subscriptions to different frontier labs and more likely three.
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.
Oh that's interesting. Right after they signed the deal with Amazon so maybe it was all compute constrained. In any case, I tried using the Codex $20/mo plan and the limits are so low I can hardly get anywhere before my agent swaps to a different agent.
Somewhat suspicious that if I do this without an official Anthropic notice I'll lose my precious Max $200/mo account so I'll sit tight perhaps for a while.
FAANG already did this all the time isn't it? Regardless of their policy. US is no better than China from my point of view. In this case, I see no difference between sending my prompts to US or China companies. At least China models are open source.
I’ve been using codex cli and GPT 5.4. It is better at coding than Opus anyway. I did not really test Opus 4.7 but older versions generated worse results compared to GPT.
Which I would not even try and test though if Anthropic did not ban my account. The shadiest thing I did was to use it with opencode for a while I think. Never installed claw or used CC tokens somewhere else.
I got sick of the inconsistency caused by Anthropic tinkering with Claude Code and had canceled my 20x. My plan was to switch to Codex so I could use it in Pi.
I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience?
I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harnesses I think. Even though I get why they want to own the eyeballs.
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 also made the switch to OpenAI, the $20 plan, I dunno about "so much better" but it's more or less the same, which is great!
The models and tools levelling out is great for users because the cost of switching is basically nil. I'm reading people ITT saying they signed up for a year - big mistake. A year is a decade right now.
It really depends on what you‘re trying to do and what your skillset is.
But if you go information architecture first and have that codified in some way (espescially if you already have the templates), then you can nudge any agent to go straight into CSS and it will produce something reasonable.
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
Doesn't using pi be against their terms of use about having to go through Claude Code cli for all Max plan usage? (I had use Droid with Max previously, it was a great combo).
It's unclear right now. The current stance is that using pi or other coding harnesses eats into extra usage and that is the behavior one sees today. We have added a hint to pi now that warns you when you use an anthropic sub.
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 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.
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.
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.
I don’t think I’ve seen a more confused and shambolic product strategy since Google’s absurd line of GChat rebrandings.
Last year I was excited about the constant forward progress on models but since February or so its just been a mess and I want off this ride.
Either way I’m going to wait for “official” word from Anthropic, which I guess at this point will probably be a “Tell HN” or Reddit text post or a Xitter from some random employee’s personal account, because apparently that’s the state of corporate communication now.
Is the tail end of the bubble, is just ridiculous things now. Models cannot made leap-improvements and now you have the enterprise to deal with and for enterprise is not about disruption so you can't break the wheel, you just need to make everyone work less.
But the bills comes thru, one has to pay AWS cause you need the servers, but pay AI agents that make mistake and everyone hopes they work just by typing and saying do x or y. And now they actually invented and engineering and deploy something called Adaptive Thinking and the models can allocate allocate zero reasoning tokens. Its game over, but it was over regardless, there is nothing special about models and they trained them now even with YouTube and soon to be Twitter(X), TikTok and bullshit. Now all those Nvidia GPUs interconnected via NVLink definitely powerful super computers, but the "software" let alone the "AI" is not there yet and OpenAI is worth close to 1 Trillions Dollars ... I mean come on!
Whether to allow Claude subscription to access other services or not, at this point, anthropic seems to be schizophrenic, sometimes worried about insufficient computing power and sometimes worried about user loss, which is puzzling.
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.
I didn't even use openclaw and Anthropic disabled my account without explanation beyond "suspicious signals". If anyone found a way to get out of that, I'd be curious to hear it - genuinely no idea what I did wrong, and the Google docs form I filled out to appeal never got me any reply.
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.
I'm out of the loop on Claude, hasn't it always been possible to use the Anthropic API with a tool like OpenClaw, paying per request? Is this limitation just for using your monthly subscription account?
This is a perfect example of how quickly you can burn through trust that took a long time to earn.
I used to be - in my small circle of friends and peers - a genuine advocate for Anthropic and Claude. It was my sole AI assistant for over a year. But somewhere around February/March, something shifted. Declining quality, policy changes, inconsistent output. Nothing dramatic, just... a slow erosion.
That erosion pushed me to try Codex. I signed up for their most expensive pro plan. Now I'm about to experiment with Kimi. I'm not saying they're better (well, sometimes they are). But here's the thing - what Anthropic did is they made me look. They made a loyal customer start shopping around. And I think that's the worst thing you can do.
Having said that - as an LLM provider for my product, we're staying with Claude. I still trust in their ethics. Please don't prove me wrong.
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.
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"
Great so now we can all look forward to Claude progressively getting reduced limits again. How long till the $1000 ultra plan... or they just want us all paying API credits instead
Looks like this was restored 2 weeks ago[0], 3 days after Anthropic said OpenClaw requires extra usage[1]. At this point, it's hard to take this seriously. No official statement and not even a tweet?
[0]: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/commit/d378a504ac17eab2...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396
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.
But... Even when running it in mode 2 ("claude -p") they at certain points tried to detect OpenClaw-usage based prompts made, and blocked them [0]. Now OpenClaw says that Antrophic sanctions this as allowable again.
I agree with GP that this is hard to take seriously.
[0]: https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357
I have never heard of this, and cannot be reproduced, and is not according to Anthropic's ToS. And there's a lot of FUD being spread around.
They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most).
Anthropic just checks for that.
Either me or you are misunderstanding the situation. A comment from the GP link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633867
> This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code.
> OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.
If Openclaw was still using Claude Code as the harness, I don't know how to reconcile that with "Openclaw is based on the pi framework", which is decidedly NOT claude code.
From what I understand, they still had the Claude Code harness available, but were mostly fully integrated on the pi agent framework, using Claude Code's oauth credentials directly,
Openclaw allows you to effectively “shell out” to another harness for your model calls, while still using Pi as your main agentic harness. This is the claude -p workflow. Tools and skills are injected into Claude and they hack session persistence into it as well.
They also absolutely blocked OpenClaw system prompts from this path in the prior weeks, based purely on keyword detection. Seems they’ve undone that now.
No, if you ran Openclaw using Anthropic API as a provider, or had it use the ‘claude -p’ cli interface, you got an email from Anthropic threatening a ban unless you upgraded billing.
This was widely reported, and happened to me. You probably can’t reproduce it or see it in docs because they seem to have changed the policy.
This is called FUD, amplify negativity, silence positivity
Considering Anthropic is constantly doing the opposite, I would just call it "balance".
It's also something super simple to clarify from Anthropic if they want.
> Anthropic staff told us OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again
Anthropic staff have had contradictive statements in Twitter and have corrected each other. Their intent for clarifications lead to confusion.
> OpenClaw treats Claude CLI reuse and claude -p usage as sanctioned for this integration unless Anthropic publishes a new policy.
Oh cool, so everything is back to business now, until they all or sudden update their policy tomorrow that retracts everything.
Anthropic have proved themselves to be be unreliable when it comes to CC. Switching to other providers is the best way to go, if you want to keep your insanity.
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.
It's the PayPal model of customer service: they'll ban you at any time for any reason or none at all, but if you're very nice they might be willing to have a human look at that decision at some point, but probably not.
Oh yeah that happened to my paypal the one time I had a user donate to me!
At least the only action I was still able to perform was to refund the user, or paypal would have just kept the money.
That's the thing, it's not announced at all. The title is wrong.
It's just OpenClaw people claiming "Anthropic told us it's fine".
They had this on here since day 1 of the block. This is just Openclaw saying "if you run Openclaw inside Claude Code, it's compliant with the Anthropic ToS", because, well, it's literally running inside Claude Code.
What's not allowed is grabbing the oauth tokens and using these for your own custom agent, which is what was (and still is) banned.
Nothing has changed, this appears to just be a giant misunderstanding (and probably a poor choice of words from Openclaw).
Strategic ambiguity.
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
> 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.
Anthropic is really trying to burn all that goodwill they worked up by raising prices, reducing limits and making it impossible to know what the actual policies are.
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).
The open models may not be as great but maybe these are good enough. AI users can switch when the prices rise before it becomes sustainable for (some) of the large LLM providers.
Currently it costs so much more to host an open model than it costs to subscribe to a much better hosted model. Which suggests it’s being massively subsidised still.
I think this has to be done with technological advances that makes things cheaper, not charging more.
I understand why they have to charge more, but not many are gonna be able to afford even $100 a month, and that doesn't seem to be sufficient.
It has to come with some combination of better algorithms or better hardware.
They probably aren’t planning on making the money on consumer subscriptions. Any price is viable as long as the user can get more value out of it than they spend.
"Sell this for less than it cost us" was a viable business plan during the ZIRP era but is not now
Making it more affordable would be very bad news for Amazon, who are now counting on $100B in new spending from OpenAI over the next 10 years.
Somethings not adding up. Why is Amazon making financial plans for the next decade based on continued OpenAI spending but you’re saying AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even close to being profitable, so how can they last a decade or more?
Who’s wrong?
I take it you don't remember 2008
Are we before or after the part where they start throwing money out of helicopters?
That's the interesting question, right? Because if this unwinds during a period of external inflation (say, because of a big war and energy shortage) then even the Bernanke would say helicopter money won't work
Someone's going to get burned here that's for sure. This isn't going to end with every person on the planet paying $100 a month for an LLM.
A guy from Meta interviewing at BBC a few years ago claimed that every school child in India was going to have the metaverse VR or they'd be left behind in their education, so every family was certainly going to pony up the money.
I see the current situation as a plus. I get SOTA models for dumping prices. And once the public providers go up with their pricing, I will be able to switch to local AI because open models have improved so much.
Boiling the frog is an art form. You've got to know when to turn up the heat and when to let it simmer.
Don’t know, I feel like I’ve watched every tech company get through every controversy without consequence.
Google when they merged YouTube and Google+, Reddit multiple times, Facebook after countless scandals. Microsoft destroying windows and pushing ads.
At the end of the day a solid product and company can withstand online controversy.
Hormussy started it.
Would you please think of the shareholders
What shareholders, Anthropic is a money burning pit. Not to the same extent as OpenAI, but both will struggle hard to actually turn a profit some day, let alone make back the massive investments they've received.
Not that they don't bring value, I'm just not convinced they'll be able to sell their products in a sticky enough way to make up the prices they'll have to extract to make up for the absurd costs.
>> both will struggle hard to actually turn a profit some day, let alone make back the massive investments they've received.
I'd agree with you, except I've heard this argument before. Amazon, Google, Facebook all burned lots of cash, and folks were convinced they would fail.
On the other hand plenty burned cash and did fail. So could go either way.
I expect, once the market consolidates to 2 big engines, they'll make bonkers money. There will be winners and losers. But I can't tell you which is which yet.
I’m not sure there will be consolidation. There’s too much room for specialization and even when the models are trained to do the same task they have very different qualities and their own strengths and weaknesses. You can’t just swap one for the other. If anything, as hardware improves I’d expect even more models and providers to become available. There’s already an ocean of fine tuned and merged models.
$20B ARR or so reported added in Q1 doesn’t sound particularly bad, they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer. The issue is they’re compute constrained on the supply side to grow faster…
> $20B ARR or so reported added in Q1 doesn’t sound particularly bad
Unless you compare with the reported cash burn or projected losses.
> they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer
But the problem is, they have no moat. Even if Claude diffuses into the economy (still to be seen how much it can effectively penetrate sectors other than engineering, spam, marketing/communications), there is no moat, all providers are interchangeable. If Antrhopic raise the prices too much, switch out to the OpenAI equivalent products.
> But the problem is, they have no moat
I disagree very strongly with this, both anecdotally and in the data - subscriptions are growing in all frontier providers; anecdata is right here in HN when you look around almost everyone is talking about CC, codex is a distant second, and completely anecdotally I personally strictly prefer GPT 5.3+ models for backend work and Opus for frontend; Gemini reviews everything that touches concurrency or SQL and finds issues the other models miss.
My general opinion is that models cannot be replaceable, because a model which can replace every other provider must excel at everything all specialist models excel at and that is impossible to serve at scale economically. IOW everyone will have at least two subscriptions to different frontier labs and more likely three.
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.
I feel this has to be said constantly, though I hate doing it.
hn is not a monolith. People here routinely disagree with each other, and that's what makes it great
I'm aware. When I say "Hacker News", I mean a very sizable portion of users who keep repeating the OpenAI collapse imminent opinion.
Oh that's interesting. Right after they signed the deal with Amazon so maybe it was all compute constrained. In any case, I tried using the Codex $20/mo plan and the limits are so low I can hardly get anywhere before my agent swaps to a different agent.
Somewhat suspicious that if I do this without an official Anthropic notice I'll lose my precious Max $200/mo account so I'll sit tight perhaps for a while.
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.
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.
Naive question but are you not afraid z.ai will train on your personal data?
FAANG already did this all the time isn't it? Regardless of their policy. US is no better than China from my point of view. In this case, I see no difference between sending my prompts to US or China companies. At least China models are open source.
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.
I’ve been using codex cli and GPT 5.4. It is better at coding than Opus anyway. I did not really test Opus 4.7 but older versions generated worse results compared to GPT.
Which I would not even try and test though if Anthropic did not ban my account. The shadiest thing I did was to use it with opencode for a while I think. Never installed claw or used CC tokens somewhere else.
This is a weird company doing weird shit.
OpenClaw says Anthropic says it's OK. Well, that's crystal clear then.
I got sick of the inconsistency caused by Anthropic tinkering with Claude Code and had canceled my 20x. My plan was to switch to Codex so I could use it in Pi.
I am specifically talking about switching because of the harness, not model quality. Anyone else match my experience?
I wonder how many other people recently did the same. It would be prudent of Anthropic to let people use Pro/Max OAuth tokens with other harnesses I think. Even though I get why they want to own the eyeballs.
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 also made the switch to OpenAI, the $20 plan, I dunno about "so much better" but it's more or less the same, which is great!
The models and tools levelling out is great for users because the cost of switching is basically nil. I'm reading people ITT saying they signed up for a year - big mistake. A year is a decade right now.
I underscored using xhigh + fast mode when saying it’s so much better.
Now with Opus 4.7 of course the “burden” of adjusting reasoning effort has been taken away from you even at the API level.
In my experience people don’t change the thinking level at all.
What issues did you consider about sending your code base to OpenAI?
Any alternative to Claude Design ? Tried Figma with Opus 4.6 but it doesn't come close in my experience.
Codex is abysmal for UI design imo.
It really depends on what you‘re trying to do and what your skillset is.
But if you go information architecture first and have that codified in some way (espescially if you already have the templates), then you can nudge any agent to go straight into CSS and it will produce something reasonable.
Google Stitch
Have you tried stitch.withgoogle.com?
Thanks for the tip! Hadn't seen that, but definitely giving it a try.
I created some decent prototypes with stitch but I don't know how it compares to claude design
stitch.withgoogle.com
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
Doesn't using pi be against their terms of use about having to go through Claude Code cli for all Max plan usage? (I had use Droid with Max previously, it was a great combo).
It's unclear right now. The current stance is that using pi or other coding harnesses eats into extra usage and that is the behavior one sees today. We have added a hint to pi now that warns you when you use an anthropic sub.
Thanks for the great work.
Probably - it was that kind of confusion that resulted in me switching providers.
Plus I like being able to switch a model.
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 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.
Same, I am from 5x plan and cancel and switched to codex as I want to use Pi.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think I’ve seen a more confused and shambolic product strategy since Google’s absurd line of GChat rebrandings.
Last year I was excited about the constant forward progress on models but since February or so its just been a mess and I want off this ride.
Either way I’m going to wait for “official” word from Anthropic, which I guess at this point will probably be a “Tell HN” or Reddit text post or a Xitter from some random employee’s personal account, because apparently that’s the state of corporate communication now.
Is the tail end of the bubble, is just ridiculous things now. Models cannot made leap-improvements and now you have the enterprise to deal with and for enterprise is not about disruption so you can't break the wheel, you just need to make everyone work less.
But the bills comes thru, one has to pay AWS cause you need the servers, but pay AI agents that make mistake and everyone hopes they work just by typing and saying do x or y. And now they actually invented and engineering and deploy something called Adaptive Thinking and the models can allocate allocate zero reasoning tokens. Its game over, but it was over regardless, there is nothing special about models and they trained them now even with YouTube and soon to be Twitter(X), TikTok and bullshit. Now all those Nvidia GPUs interconnected via NVLink definitely powerful super computers, but the "software" let alone the "AI" is not there yet and OpenAI is worth close to 1 Trillions Dollars ... I mean come on!
Why? Did they figure out cheaper compute? Or did they lose a lot of users, and now the compute is there unused?
Whether to allow Claude subscription to access other services or not, at this point, anthropic seems to be schizophrenic, sometimes worried about insufficient computing power and sometimes worried about user loss, which is puzzling.
Almost seems like business leaders have to balance different aspirations and make tradeoffs. Unbelieveable.
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.
I didn't even use openclaw and Anthropic disabled my account without explanation beyond "suspicious signals". If anyone found a way to get out of that, I'd be curious to hear it - genuinely no idea what I did wrong, and the Google docs form I filled out to appeal never got me any reply.
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.
I'm out of the loop on Claude, hasn't it always been possible to use the Anthropic API with a tool like OpenClaw, paying per request? Is this limitation just for using your monthly subscription account?
Yes, exactly.
Does this mean you can use openclaw with a Claude Pro account? I'm curious try it but no way i'm going to pay API rates.
Maybe it’s allowed because they built the ability to direct the costs to your extra usage budget, not your monthly subscription?
Same, I am from the 3x plan and canceled and switched to Codex 2 days ago...
Correction: OpenClaw says Anthropic says OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is okay again.
(That's implied by the sitename to the right of the title)
/gestures at all the comments
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.
How can they be this bad at this? What was all that about then?
题外话，你们不觉得在 openclaw 里用 claude 相当浪费 token 吗？
Swapped my OpenClaw to Claude again. I played around with Gemini and Chinese models in past month but it didn’t work for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openclaw.ai
hot damn
a more authoritative source (aka a tweet) woudl be nice.
The sentient had already sailed. It's hard to trust Anthropic here given the ringer they have dragged us through.
Contrast that to what GitHub did which was to pause new customers to ensure quality remained and things were stable.
Correct title: OpenClaw says Anthropic said OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage is allowed again
Guess they saw the growth of their growth shrink dramatically lol
More people flocked to Codex and found out that it's not worse, and sometimes superior.
This is a perfect example of how quickly you can burn through trust that took a long time to earn. I used to be - in my small circle of friends and peers - a genuine advocate for Anthropic and Claude. It was my sole AI assistant for over a year. But somewhere around February/March, something shifted. Declining quality, policy changes, inconsistent output. Nothing dramatic, just... a slow erosion.
That erosion pushed me to try Codex. I signed up for their most expensive pro plan. Now I'm about to experiment with Kimi. I'm not saying they're better (well, sometimes they are). But here's the thing - what Anthropic did is they made me look. They made a loyal customer start shopping around. And I think that's the worst thing you can do.
Having said that - as an LLM provider for my product, we're staying with Claude. I still trust in their ethics. Please don't prove me wrong.
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.
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.
Perfect, thanks. Codex app sucks, but I've been exploring opencode for that. Will try MiniMax!
Enshittification 101, codex is undergoing the same thing on a 3 month lag.
Haha, thanks for the heads-up
How about third party coding harnesses?
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"
I do claw like things all the time. Give CC an API document and it figures out how to take a snapshot of the data. Pulls it down and does an analysis.
Would that apply to OpenCode too?
Canceled anyway.
Did they disable this to give them time to come out with their own agent?
Can we get OpenCode support back as well?
And tomorrow, it won't be allowed any more and accounts will be closed without prior notice.
Use something else.
Bad Decision.
Great so now we can all look forward to Claude progressively getting reduced limits again. How long till the $1000 ultra plan... or they just want us all paying API credits instead
Same PR strategy as the US administration lol
I guess it doesn't matter any more, everyone bought all the mac minis
Pfft. Damage done, users know that Anthrophic will pull the rug from under them again if given half a chance. So yea, plan accordingly.