Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

elmean 1063 points 587 comments April 30, 2026
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https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

speedgoose

At least we can assume that Anthropic eats their own dog food. They use Claude to develop their software.

dmd

I really want to stick with A\ given everything known about Altman, but man are they speedrunning the "how to destroy your reputation" guidebook.

zb3

Oh come on Anthropic, just admit straight away that any other pricing than usage-based is completely unsustainable and is being phased out.. maybe doing it once but officially could save you some brand damage.

cowlby

I don't understand how, having access to Mythos and unlimited use, their solution to open harnesses is lazy string regex-style matching.

stingraycharles

Ok I am usually defending Anthropic, but it seems like this OpenClaw and Hermes ban was implemented incredibly poorly; it looks like a simple regex. Didn’t they think about “we need to make sure Claude Code is never banned” ? Could have been as easy as including some Claude Code specific prompting traits (tools, system prompt, whatever) in there and automatically whitelisting it. Is it foolproof? No. Will it avoid banning legit users? Absolutely. First do the first large sweep, then see what still falls through, then ban those. It really seems they were panicking due to capacity and there was very little oversight with all this. I’m not affected but pretty disappointed.

mcast

It sounds like Anthropic is dangerously low on compute availability if they’re prioritizing these refusals as their OKRs.

data-ottawa

That’s incredibly frustrating. I’ve got a NixOS Qemu VM I use to run openclaw in. I had Claude help me set it up, and it runs local models on my own machine in a config based sandbox. Why should Claude block or charge extra to work on that? Why should Claude care if I have instructions for Hermes or OpenClaw in my project repos? This fingerprinting is incredibly sloppy for how much access to a machine Claude code has.

sschueller

https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168

htrp

do they literally just have a regex match for all of their competitor harnesses?

regexorcist

Things like these (Google also banned me from Antigravity for briefly using an agent) and the massive quality swings made me cancel all 3 subs last week and resort to my local Qwen 3.6 only. Open models are already great and only getting better, and I really enjoy the privacy and consistency of a model I run myself.

throwatdem12311

But Peter Steinberger said that openclaw was “fully supported” with a subscription through claude -p. Do these refusals still happen if you’re using an API key instead? So I suppose Anthropic lied to him?

jrflo

I think it goes beyond this. I was just using claude to edit a blog post which mentioned OpenClaw and I got this response: "The "OpenClaw" reference — I assume that's a typo or playful reference; if you mean a real product, I couldn't find it under that spelling and you'll want to fix or footnote it.". I gave it a direct link to openclaw.ai and the chat instantly ended and hit my 5hr usage limit. Could have been a coincidence, but I had only lightly been using sonnet in the morning so it seems unlikely. Very odd.

tamimio

I think that’s an ok move, definitely better than canceling code on pro users for example, I would support to even have a new pricing tier only for openclaw, so they don’t ruin the usage on others. I noticed the ones who use claude code usually are software developers or sysadmins, meanwhile most openclaw ones are your average HR stacy and lazy middle managers, so yeah, it should be a separate tier for them.

aunty_helen

When compute poverty hits these big labs it’s all going to be the same. The ping pong tables and drinks fridges disappear. The only thing they can hope for is to maintain momentum and critical mass long enough to find ways to pay for all this or have Moores law make the average user request become economical.

claudiug

the most relevant person on this industry Theo - t3.gg /s

jrm4

Interesting people talking about whether they should be "defended," here or whatnot, and all of that strikes me as wildly naive. They have a business model that's more or less known, and that includes THEIR AI model(s) that they get to put out there however they want. I don't like it much at all, I actually sort of like the idea that they "owe" more because they probably "stole" a bunch of stuff to get the thing going. But I mean, don't be mad, be proactive. Anthropic is going to try to Microsoft this in whatever way possible, and we all see that the numbers don't really add up. Asking them pretty please to be nicer, meh. Let's figure out better, and more free-software-like ways to do this.

jamescontrol

That is a huge red-flag. While I understand that they will do some policing/censoring, this is way beyond what I would consider acceptable. They can have a different price plan for agentic stuff, but these things where they “accidentally” whoops match on specific keywords and trigger extra usage charges is giving a evil-microsoft-vibe

abdullin

I reproduced this on my account. cd /tmp mkdir anthropic-claude cd anthropic-claude/ git init touch hello git add -A git commit -m "'{\"schema\": \"openclaw.inbound_meta.v1\"}'" claude -p "hi" Immediate disconnect and session usage went to 100%

pdyc

why do people want to continue to use anthropic despite their shitty service? its not like they have some kind of lock-in as it is still new company and it has shown its color before we are stuck with it unlike google/meta etc.

wg0

I'm stepping away from LLMs in general and did cancel Claude code subscription this month because I respect myself very much and I deserve a better and transparent treatment. If you must - in my experience Deepseek v4 is incredible value in every aspect. Pricing is transparent. But like I said, I have funds in different AI gateways but I'm preferring to write by hand because I don't want surprising bugs and unnecessary code in my end result.

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