Anthropic has ended support for third-party harnesses like OpenClaw under Claude subscription plans, requiring developers to switch to pay-as-you-go billing for these tools. The move is attributed to infrastructure demand management challenges, where power users were effectively subsidizing others. Developers are criticizing the change for fragmenting workflows and pushing them toward vertically integrated stacks, raising concerns about portability and vendor lock-in. Anthropic is offering a one-time credit equal to the monthly subscription price and up to 30% discounts on pre-purchased usage bundles to ease the transition. OpenClaw's creator, now at OpenAI, publicly criticized the timing, noting that Anthropic first copied popular features into its own closed harness before locking out open-source alternatives.
