What's Changing

Starting today, April 4, 2026 at 12:00 PM PT (8:00 PM BST), Anthropic will no longer allow Claude subscription limits to cover usage through third-party harnesses like OpenClaw. This means users who previously relied on their Claude Pro, Max, or Team subscriptions to power OpenClaw sessions will need to make some changes.

Your Claude subscription still covers all of Anthropic's first-party products, including Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. But any usage routed through third-party tools will now require Extra Usage, a pay-as-you-go option billed separately from your subscription.

Why Anthropic Is Doing This

In their email to affected subscribers, Anthropic cited capacity management as the driving factor. Third-party harnesses, they say, "put an outsized strain on our systems." The company wants to prioritize capacity for customers using their core products.

This isn't entirely surprising. Tools like OpenClaw can generate significantly more API traffic than a typical Claude.ai conversation, especially when running multiple agents, background tasks, or automated workflows. From Anthropic's perspective, a $20/month Pro subscriber driving heavy agent traffic through OpenClaw looks very different from someone chatting in a browser tab.

What You Should Do

If you currently use Anthropic's OAuth login (the "Sign in with Claude" flow) to authenticate OpenClaw, you have a few options:

Option 1: Enable Extra Usage

WARNING - API Credits can cost a lot more than you are used to on your OAuth Subscription plan.

Turn on Extra Usage in your Anthropic account settings. This keeps your existing setup working but adds pay-as-you-go billing on top of your subscription. Anthropic is offering two sweeteners to ease the transition:

A one-time credit equal to your monthly subscription price, redeemable by April 17, 2026
Volume discounts of up to 30% when you pre-purchase bundles of Extra Usage

Option 2: Switch to an Anthropic API Key

If you want clearer, usage-based billing without the subscription layer, you can create an API key in the Anthropic Console and set it up in ClawManager.

How to do it in ClawManager:

Open ClawManager and go to Global Settings
Click the Providers icon (the plug icon in the top toolbar)
Select Anthropic from the provider list
Choose API Key as the authentication method
Paste your API key from the Anthropic Console
Click Save and ClawManager will reconfigure your gateway automatically

No terminal commands needed. ClawManager handles the config update for you.

Option 3: Switch Providers

OpenClaw supports multiple model providers, several of which offer subscription-style pricing that explicitly supports third-party tool usage:

OpenAI Codex with ChatGPT sign-in (subscription access explicitly supported for external tools)
Alibaba Cloud Model Studio with Qwen models and a coding plan
MiniMax with a coding plan option
Z.AI / GLM with a coding plan

If you manage your providers through ClawManager, switching is straightforward from the Global Settings page.

Option 4: Request a Refund

Anthropic mentioned that a follow-up email will go out tomorrow (April 5) with the option to refund your subscription if you'd prefer not to continue under the new terms.

What This Means for ClawManager Users

If you use ClawManager to manage an OpenClaw gateway running Anthropic models via OAuth, this change affects you directly. Your gateway will continue to function, but Anthropic will bill any Claude usage through it as Extra Usage rather than drawing from your subscription allowance.

ClawManager already supports configuring multiple providers. If you want to switch to an API key or a different provider entirely, you can do it from the provider setup in Global Settings without reinstalling anything.

The Bigger Picture

This move follows a pattern we've seen across the AI industry. As agent frameworks and automation tools drive higher per-user usage, providers are rethinking how subscription pricing maps to actual compute costs. OpenAI has taken the opposite approach so far, explicitly welcoming third-party tool usage under ChatGPT subscriptions. Whether that holds as agent usage scales remains to be seen.

For now, the practical advice is simple: check your OpenClaw auth method, decide whether Extra Usage or an API key makes more sense for your workflow, and don't forget to redeem that one-time credit before April 17 if you go this route.
We recommend Chat GPT Oauth method to use AI at a subscription rate comparred to API credits.