Item — HN Reader

> 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.

7 comments

> 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.

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.

Straight up PayPal and Venmo can go to hell. They banned my account, I painted a gun for a guy with a cerakote bale-on setup. He paid with PayPal and they banned me. His gun, just a legal service to paint it.

I pulled our company portal away from PayPal when they refused to restore my account.

Five years later, I tried to re-activate and the human I finally got to effectively told me to fuck off; so I will spend the rest of my life bashing that trash company at every chance.

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.

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).

But there was a period of time when using Openclaw via Claude Code (via -p) was not allowed and it even gave an error message in that case. That's why people find the constantly changing messaging confusing.

https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357

That's how I took that; if I installed CC and worked in CC to modify OC, all good. If I ran the openclaw gateway itself with a CC oauth key, my bad.

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".

Strategic ambiguity.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

With Uber and Lyft or even Anthropic versus OpenAI versus <insert flavor of the month here> I don’t even try to attach myself to any one brand.

It’s so easy to switch between all of them. I can open the Uber and Lyft apps and compare in a minute. I can run Claude and ChatGPT in parallel and see which one gets a better handle on the question. I can switch LLM providers with a few minutes of signing up for one and cancelling the other.

They all try to encourage brand lock in but it’s easy to pick up and move if you’re using them for their main service.

This isn't really a fair comparison imo.

There hasnt been near the confusion and drama surrounding things like codex and gemini-cli. I don't think they're all on the same pedestal right now