It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.

This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...

At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.