alt Hacker NewsGoogle restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw
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This is like ISPs banning customers in the 90s for using Napster to download music.
A lot of people running OpenClaw just have it generated and burning tokens for no reason. They just know more tokens = doing stuff so want to spend as many tokens as possible.
one of my account is banned without any reason. I don't even use OpenClaw.
Anthropic did something similar too didn't they, iirc it was blocking 3rd party tools from the subscription plans?
Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?
Is this how tech companies operate now...
1) Stand up a service 2) ??? 3) Profit
??? - worry about any substantial support later
Everyone and their Uncle Bob have been scrambling to leverage LLM Agents for Process/Task/Message Scheduling and Orchestration with Durable Execution. They have been worshiping Peter Steinberger as their champion and the God of LLM Agents. While Temporal.IO has quietly partnered with Apple to Schedule and Orchestrate all of their services with Durable Execution. It's funny how everyone assumes that using Inference for Deterministic Tasks like Mathematics and Compiler Optimization is a good idea. Reality doesn't agree. Wasting Electricity and Precious Minerals for Inference Compute is Reality. Compilers and Schedulers are deterministic, your LLM is not. You cannot infer Mathematics and assume the correct answer, we have Calculators and Compilers for a reason. Scheduling Algorithms have existed since the 1950's just like Inference Algorithms. Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest, OVH/uTask, OVH/cds, Restate, Woodpecker CI, Erlang BEAM VM, Gradle, Zig Build, Cargo, Linux Package Managers, Bazel... Shall I go on? Keep your AGENTS.MD, we have Temporal.IO at home. Thank you for your Contributions to Open Source Maxim Fateev. Betting the US Economy on LLM Chat Bots was a bad idea my beautiful friends. Remember Elizabeth Holmes, Mortgage Backed Securities? Scam Altman must be laughing from his Tower of Evil right now...
Isn't this sort of repeated communication gaffe why they hired @OfficialLoganK?
Of course they don't like it. CLAW makes the platform fungible and once that happens the magic by which their insane multiples of values exist bursts.
I can guarantee in their attempt to stop OpenClaw users, some users using it normally will get caught in the dragnet. It could mean your whole Google account is suspended, not just for Antigravity.
I would highly encourage you to not only stop using Antigravity oAuth for OpenClaw, but to use Antigravity with a side account or stop using it altogether. Is using Antigravity worth losing your main account or getting it banned for using paid services (for extra storage, YouTube premium, etc). Even side accounts are risky since in the post thread people are saying Google applied the ban to all their accounts.
To be accurate, when you auth OpenClaw the Google page specifically says to not proceed unless you are authorizing a Google product.
I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.
The only suckers here are those paying $249 a month to Google instead of used GPU sellers.
It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable.
It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.
legit ban, violating tos, using antigravity tokens for open claw token burning machine
At this point, running Chinese model like GLM-5 or Kimi K2 would be far more safer than risking off your LLM subscriptions. Quite the irony that our AI techno-feudal corpo overlords doesn't want to see their LLM take off with curious and useful open source ideas. Just like Microsoft, they deliberately buried it for some reason.
Oh, maybe not, they did it in the name of "terms of service abuse" and "risk assessment".
Thus it would be far better if we can just have SOTA open weight model to run OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Molt at least we are under control. And as you see the two Chinese models I mentioned are indeed open weight, albeit taking atrocious amount of resource to really self host, and you probably need to have abliterations to remove their political guardrails.
Sigh. We can't have great things with those big tech corpos and CCP politics. Big question: Why has this world gone to shit lately.
Well OpenClaw is an OpenAI product now, right?
Effectively.
Why is everyone surprised, these subscriptions are basically toys. You pay so much, and you get about that much in inference compute, more if you’re lucky / early.
If you want to real use these things get an API key and pay the true marginal cost of your compute like a grown up.
This is such a braindead move. Western AI companies short-term greed will just let Chinese companies win. If I were google, I'd just throttle or release a heavily cached version of their API for OpenClaw and automatically detect and direct openclaw usage to this model. Personally, Anthropic and Google's recent moves are just making me go all-in on self-hosted AI.
<Blasts terminal>: Boring conversation anyway.
Between this, and whatever Claude has been doing lately, like giving the AI the ability to just disconnect if it dislikes your prompt, I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at.
> we are unable to reverse the suspension
I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.
Account ban?
I just use Gemini 3.1 Pro (High) on Antigravity.
GPT-5.3-Codex is the best on OpenClaw.
Sonnet 4.6 uses 50x more session tokens than GPT-5.3-Codex on OpenClaw.
Both Google and Anthropic are choosing the wrong route here. While I see the formal aspect of abusing an OAuth token and burning through subsidized tokens, this only creates an internal accounting problem in the short term.
Meanwhile the rising popularity of Claws creates a yet untapped new market segment where users spend significant tokens.
A „soft“ migration of users by explaining to them how the API works, how to pay and how to change from OAuth would be way smarter.
The way this plays out right now is that current Claws users are massively penalized by being suspended indefinitely and new users will think twice. And we can expect a solid PR disaster / Streisand effect for the „poor“ model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic.
Commercially choosing the soft route by warning and throttling will be way smarter and possibly generate more long term revenue
These companies are engaged in a sort of AI dumping. Cheap inference below cost.
Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance.
It's the big tech playbook.
I don't think it's going to work this time.
Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly.
LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs.
Telecom tech killed telecom dominance.
With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.
Meanwhile it's day 3? 4? since Gemini 3.1 was announced with a claim that Gemini CLI users would have access to it, but AI Pro subscribers still don't see it, and there's been no clarification from Google about what is going on, and why:
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/19532
They are not serious. I only keep the "AI Pro" sub because it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family.
Anyways, Google, nobody wants to use your bad VSCode fork. I want to use my own tools, and use your model where it makes sense as part of my own workflow.
This kind of crap is exactly what I don't want to spend energy worrying about, so I'll wait a few months for the models I can host to catch up.
Meh, that's ok. Not using openclaw anyway. Doesn't sound useful to be frank.
And the AI price shock begins…
See? This is what a monopoly player flexing looks like. For the people putting all their eggs in a single basket. Can we please stop supporting centralised services? It only gets worse from here.
This is how open source wins
How!!!
How
For fuck sake, OpenClaw is destroying everything. Shitty users of OpenClaw will force the LLM providers to limit quotas for legitimate users. OpenClaw should die.
Assuming these plans are based on Gemini, Google is doing these users a favor, frankly.
Does anyone know if this ban means you lose your email/pixel/youtube/google ads/google gtm stuff?
This basically makes it a deal breaker to use google ai stuff because you can be royally fucked by one ban.
LOL. This entire thread basically reads why you should never build dev tools. It's difficult to find a more entitled, cheapskate bunch of people who are completely clueless about business.
TIL it's "unfair" to sell a product for a particular purpose and offer subsidised rates to build a customer base. Different planet.
So there is such a thing as a free lunch! Oh wait...
big company doesn't want you using something other than their stuff and they'll steal your money and ban you, or similarly, big company wants your data... this happens every day. its nice having choices isnt it? ill just leave this big company and use... oh wait. its another big company.
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Google opens claw! /s
Imagine paying Google for something in 2026. You get no support and have no recourse.
Take out your data, file a charge back, and move on with your life.
Saaarrrr? Saaar?
It's not certain this is related to OpenClaw (or OpenClown as I like to call it).
This is more a discussion about how broken support is at Google.
> The entire support flowchart is completely broken, and they are still billing us $250/mo for bricked accounts. I just documented the entire Kafkaesque support loop over on the google_antigravity subreddit. If you are stuck in this same Catch-22, go search for that post over there and share your Trajectory IDs in the comments so we can get some actual engineering eyes on this mass ban wave.
Take your money to the Chinese companies instead. These evil megacorps are more interested in destroyed your privacy in service to the Epstein Cabal controlling every facet of your life. How dare Google, a trillion dollar company, charge you for AI ultra then ban you for using your own credits/usage allowance. This whole debacle, along with Anthropic, fall foul of The Digital Human Right to Adversarial Interoperability.
It is imperative that open source wins this battle. Not these evil megacorps and their substandard tools.
Are Google engineers so inept as to not be able to integrate technical measures against oc use? Do they think people using these plugins know the mechanisms used? And after all that they have the nerve to ban you from using their own products (AG). Ridiculous company.
Thanks, Google.
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