Anthropic Adds Pay-As-You-Go for OpenClaw Usage

Anthropic has informed subscribers via email that they will now have to pay extra to use OpenClaw, according to posts by users on Reddit and Hacker News. However, users can still access third-party harnesses via a "pay-as-you-go option" billed separately. To ease the shift, the company is offering a one-time credit equal to the monthly subscription, along with discounts of up to 30% on prepaid usage.

Additionally, the company said, "these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritise our customers using our core products."

What is OpenClaw? OpenClaw is an agentic open-source tool that lets AI models control a user's computer to carry out tasks. It connects to apps and services, enabling the model to send messages, browse websites, manage files, and execute commands through a chat interface.

OpenClaw users were recently banned from Google's Antigravity: Google recently restricted access to its Antigravity coding platform for some users who accessed it via OpenClaw in February 2026. Notably, the move affected even paid subscribers and was linked to the use of third-party tools in ways that violated terms of service. Google said it acted after detecting a "massive increase" in malicious usage that degraded service quality for other users.

OpenClaw breaks subscription pricing model: Companies are moving OpenClaw-style usage to pay-as-you-go pricing because AI agents fundamentally change cost dynamics. Unlike chat use, agents execute multi-step workflows, call tools, and generate far higher token volumes per task, meaning cost scales with behavior, not just usage.

Furthermore, even simple requests can expand into thousands of tokens, and at scale, these interactions can rapidly drive up infrastructure costs. This creates a mismatch with flat subscriptions, which assume predictable usage.