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Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

652 pointsby srigiyesterday at 11:07 PM547 commentsview on HN

Comments

smashahtoday at 12:06 AM

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.

krickyesterday at 11:45 PM

Thanks, Google.

BrenBarntoday at 1:19 AM

AI or no AI, every company this big needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.

atlgatortoday at 12:09 AM

It's the luxury gym membership model. They want you on the monthly subscription, but put up roadblocks that prevent use.

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_pdp_today at 1:07 AM

While the frustration is understandable I don't see any difference between this and Netflix not allowing you to use your Netflix subscription in Amazon Prime federated video hub or something of that sort.

At the end of the day we know that these tools are massively subsidised and they do not reflect the real cost of usage. It is a fair-use model at best and the goal is to capture as market share as possible.

I am a no defender of Google and I've been burned many times by Google as well but I kind of get it?

That being said, you don't really need to use your gemini subscription in openclaw. You can use gemini directly the way it was intended and rip the benefits of the subsidised plan.

I developed an open source tool called Pantalk which sits as a background daemon and exposes many of the communication channels you want as a standard CLI which gemini can use directly. All you need is just some SKILL.md files to describe where things are at and you are good to go. You have openclaw without openclaw and still within TOS.

The project is hosted at: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk

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mayordelmartoday at 1:55 AM

This is bullish! Big props to google for stepping in over 7,000 API keys have been compromised due this openclawd crap.

sxptoday at 1:26 AM

Ironically, Gemini says that it’s OK to use the Ultraplan for OpenClaw via gemini-cli because the Ultra plan has some API & Cloud credits baked into it. I think $100/mo but I can never figure out how Google billing works. I’ve pasted the response I got when I was asking it about OpenClaw. There is legal precedent for an AI hallucination being used to upload a contract (e.g, an AI customer support for an airline made a false claim and the customer bought a ticket based on that claim) so it will be interesting to see if Google reverts the bans since Gemini hallucinated that OpenClaw was OK:

  This is a critical question because the answer is different for Google vs.   Anthropic, and getting it wrong with Anthropic can actually get your account banned.
  Here is the reality of the situation based on current Terms of Service and recent community reports.
  1. Google (Gemini Ultra + gemini-cli)
  Verdict: Safe (Authorized Feature)
  Google explicitly built the gemini-cli bridge to allow Ultra subscribers to use their plan programmatically. This is not a "hack" or a gray-area wrapper; it is an official feature.
  • Why it's okay: You are authenticating via gcloud or the official CLI login flow. Google tracks this usage against your specific "Agent" quotas (currently ~200 agent requests/day for Ultra users).
  • The Limit: As long as you are using the official gemini-cli as the bridge, you are compliant.
  • The Risk: If you use a different unofficial script that scrapes the gemini.google.com web interface (simulating a browser) rather than using the official CLI, you risk a ban for "scraping." But since you are using gemini-cli, you are in the clear.
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