OpenClaw is popular, but not by the people responsible for keeping Anthropic’s services online. The company has banned subscription-based pricing for users looking to get things going with open-source agent tools on Claude.
Although it’s probably not OpenClaw’s fault, Claude suffered a drop in service on Monday as it continued its efforts to balance capacity and demand.
The company’s status page states that it has “identified an issue causing an increase in errors in Claude.ai, including desktop and mobile,” and characterized the incident as a “partial outage.” Over the past 90 days, uptime has dropped to 98.82%.
An Anthropic spokesperson did not immediately say what caused the problem. However, the confusion did not last long.
The company’s status page states, “From 15:00 to 16:30 (UTC) on April 6th, there were many errors when logging into Claude.ai and Claude Code.” “This issue also impacted other product features such as some conversations and voice modes in Claude.ai. This issue has now been resolved.”
The service interruption follows a period of increased demand for Claude, which the company sought to respond to by denying access to third-party tools that use AI services through subscriptions. “Starting tomorrow at 12pm PT, Claude’s subscription will no longer cover usage with third-party tools like OpenClaw,” Claude Code head Boris Cerny said on Friday.
Charney explained that this limitation resulted from engineering constraints. “Our systems are highly optimized for certain types of workloads, and we continue to optimize them to provide the most intelligent models to as many people as possible,” he said.
Still, he insisted, “We’re big fans of open source. We’ve actually just published some open source.” [pull requests] Specifically to improve OpenClaw’s prompt cache efficiency. ”
Google took similar action in February to enforce terms of service related to its Antigravity AI development environment, Gemini CLI, and Gemini Code Assist. “Using third-party software, tools, or services to obtain or piggyback Gemini CLI’s OAuth authorization to access backend services is a direct violation of Gemini CLI’s applicable terms and policies,” said Jack Wotherspoon, Gemini CLI developer representative, at the time.
Anthropic sells AI service tokens through subscriptions or APIs. Subscribers pay a flat fee and are subject to session and monthly usage limits, with the option to pay additional usage if the cap is reached. API customers pay per token and have no usage limits. For developers who use Claude frequently, subscription-based pricing can be significantly cheaper.
In this reporter’s case, a $20 monthly subscription allowed for approximately $236 in token usage during the month of March (this does not necessarily reflect Anthropic’s actual cost per token). Some places report similarly skewed ratios when comparing the price paid to above list price (36x on one measure). Perhaps this balance will be maintained to some extent by developers paying for underutilized subscriptions. But as Anthropic works toward going public, it has an incentive to ensure its customer acquisition strategy doesn’t drive customers to competing products or increase costs.
The developer community has long recognized the price benefits of Claude subscriptions, and many subscribers choose to use third-party harnesses (OpenCode, Pi, etc.) to interact with Claude Code.
Unfortunately, Anthropic is having a hard time meeting demand. In February, the industry reaffirmed its existing policy prohibiting the use of third-party harnesses with Claude subscriptions. It was around the time that OpenClaw, an AI agent platform that operated autonomously 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, began to attract attention.
In late March, Anthropic introduced another strategy to balance demand and capacity. It changed the way subscription usage is calculated, allowing customers to use up their usage limits faster during peak times.
As of April 4, 2026, Anthropic transitioned from policy warnings to claims-based enforcement.
“Starting April 4th, third-party tools will utilize additional usage instead of subscription limits,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement provided to Barron’s. register. “Using Claude’s subscriptions with third-party tools is not permitted under our terms of service and places a significant burden on our systems. Capacity is something we manage carefully and must prioritize customers using our core products.”
Claude subscriptions continue to apply to Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Cowork.
Anthropic sought to alleviate the bad blood caused by this move, which was announced one day before implementation, by offering subscribers one month’s worth of additional usage credits based on their monthly plan. The company is also offering extra usage bundles at 30% off. If it is not satisfactory, the customer can cancel the plan and get a refund.
Customers can continue to use Claude with third-party tools using additional usage bundles (purchased from their Claude account page) or API keys.
“While we have worked hard to meet the growing demand for Claude, our subscriptions were not built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” Charney explained. “Capacity is a resource that we carefully manage, and we prioritize customers who use our products and APIs.”
Capacity is a resource that can continue to become scarce as demand continues to increase. Bloomberg recently reported that more than half of U.S. data centers scheduled to open this year will face delays. ®
