Starting April 4th, Anthropic will prohibit third-party tools from using Claude subscription credits. This policy is not targeted at any specific product and applies to all similar tools—OpenClaw is simply the first to be officially named.
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, explained it bluntly: "The subscription plan wasn't designed for the usage patterns of these third-party tools." This translates to roughly this: a $200 monthly Max plan could result in heavy users consuming between $1,000 and $5,000 in API usage per day. That's a difference of up to 50 times in cost.
This was not an accident; it was a correction after the pricing misalignment was discovered.
What does OpenClaw's proposed alternative illustrate?
After receiving the policy notification, OpenClaw responded on the X platform , suggesting that users switch to API Key or switch to OpenAI Codex, Qwen, MiniMax, Kimi, or GLM.
This list is worth a closer look. OpenAI Codex is at the top, and the other four are all from Chinese companies. This isn't an advertisement; it's the current reality of the AI coding tool market: aside from paying direct API fees, the competitive landscape for alternatives is much more open than it was six months ago.
The issue of the moat also arises: if users can change the underlying model in a single response, is Claude's stickiness in coding scenarios based on model quality or on the past flawed pricing of "$200 for unlimited use"?
Returning to the true cost is not a punishment.
Describing this policy change as a "ban" is an overinterpretation. Anthropic has not closed any channels; the API remains open, and the billing logic is transparent—you pay for what you use. The only real change is that subsidies have ended.
For average users whose daily cost is less than $50, this adjustment will be almost imperceptible. For heavy users who treat their $200 monthly fee as if they were using $100,000 of computing power, it was only a matter of time before their bills were realigned with their actual costs.
The only question is: was the decision to take action on April 4th made because the technology was ready, or because the cost of the model had finally become too high to wait any longer? The company situations corresponding to these two answers are actually quite different.
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