alt Hacker NewsClaude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"
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i wouldn't be surprised if we see class action lawsuits from this given it's so easily reproducible by so many
So far, after reading ~20 HN comments, I see one mention of something akin to "I verified this myself". Where are the people saying "Maybe this is true, but please tell me you considered other explanations first!"
I try to avoid X, and I put relatively low credence in a HN account I don't know. [1] Browsing X, it looks like something like 1 out of 20 say they verified.
Who here has _verified_ this claim or can find a _quality_ source that has? Not X. Someone who will take serious reputational or financial damage if they are wrong?
It is 2026. Think about epistemics. What do you believe and why? And why should I believe you if you aren't asking this question?
This situation has many characteristics of being an information cascade. [2] Raise your hand if you piled on before thinking it through. Be honest. Everyone does it sometimes. Intellectually honest people own it.
P.S. I am _not_ making a claim about the original statement. Don't shoot the messenger: somebody needs to say what I'm saying.
[1]: "We cannot trust identity like we used to here on HN ... we live in a world or anyone or any AI can claim almost anything ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47804884
I find it interesting that I use Opus tokens and I have 0 issues.
Highly relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
(You're the principal, directing what to do, but your agent Anthropic has its own motivations that are not aligned with your will.)
Is it just me or everybody finds the "charging extra" a bit vague? I don't deny it simply curious: how much?
I hereby propose we rename the HN frontpage to "Claude Customer Support"
Just curious if that is automatic or someone manually check all that
This is Skynet 8.0.
After they fought humans and dumbed them down into AI-slavery, the machines now fight one another. Claude versus OpenClaw - may the worst win! \o/
I am using Claude Code with GLM, Kimi, MiniMax and Xiaomi MiMo. So this doesn't happen to me. :P
Claude is bad for business....that is painfully obvious.
At this point I assume you are coping with having drank the koolaid and fired key staff believing claude will replace them...back when it was cheap....because nearsightedness affects decision makers much more during hype cycles......
Imagine you trained the large language model which is too dangerous for humanity but you regexp over git commits to solve your subscription subsidy issues
I tried to replicate this but Claude was already down https://status.claude.com/
When asking about Openclaw in normal Claude Webchat it very peculiarly denied knowing what that is.
Even when asked to search online it still gaslighted me about it.
But Peter Steinberger said that openclaw was “fully supported” with a subscription through claude -p.
Do these refusals still happen if you’re using an API key instead?
So I suppose Anthropic lied to him?
Ok I am usually defending Anthropic, but it seems like this OpenClaw and Hermes ban was implemented incredibly poorly; it looks like a simple regex.
Didn’t they think about “we need to make sure Claude Code is never banned” ? Could have been as easy as including some Claude Code specific prompting traits (tools, system prompt, whatever) in there and automatically whitelisting it.
Is it foolproof? No. Will it avoid banning legit users? Absolutely.
First do the first large sweep, then see what still falls through, then ban those.
It really seems they were panicking due to capacity and there was very little oversight with all this.
I’m not affected but pretty disappointed.
Having had Claude Code jump to inserting juvenile and all-filtering regex to (attempt to) solve open-ended semantic natural language problems (-sigh- there's 12 hours of my life I'll never get back), I can absolutely imagine that this was someone trying to code up a "defense in depth" mechanic that was explosively insufficient after Claude Code (even Opus 4.6) made a series of faulty assumptions.
This one feels like prime space for Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
The hassle with the performance of these systems is that they're ~70% of the way to awesome. For advanced prototyping (my current job description), a fast 60% of awesome is groundbreaking and game-changing. For production and real businesses, that last 30% is a really, really important thing to figure out.
Oh come on Anthropic, just admit straight away that any other pricing than usage-based is completely unsustainable and is being phased out.. maybe doing it once but officially could save you some brand damage.
The account posted is a massive grifter. He trolls twitter to make content for his youtube channel, which seems to be his primary occupation.
I am not saying that claude has not done this, I am just saying you need a better source than the Jake Paul of tech influencers.
OK, so, OpenAI represents the worst of Silicon Valley 2026.
Anthropic is going a different direction but not better.
People who think LLMs are neutral tools are delusional. They will be used not just to shape public discourse (like "social networks") but more importantly they can be used to shape an individual's thinking.
If facebook/twitter/reddit are perfectly OK with intentionally increasing addictivity but are restricted by having to show you only existing stuff, what do you think will happen when LLM companies can generate new stuff tailored to each individual person?
Interesting people talking about whether they should be "defended," here or whatnot, and all of that strikes me as wildly naive.
They have a business model that's more or less known, and that includes THEIR AI model(s) that they get to put out there however they want. I don't like it much at all, I actually sort of like the idea that they "owe" more because they probably "stole" a bunch of stuff to get the thing going.
But I mean, don't be mad, be proactive. Anthropic is going to try to Microsoft this in whatever way possible, and we all see that the numbers don't really add up.
Asking them pretty please to be nicer, meh. Let's figure out better, and more free-software-like ways to do this.
This is almost like shadow-banning.
Absurd, really.
But, but, but Opus 4.7 says "I'm Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. I'm not familiar with "OpenClaw". How could it be that it somehow knows about OpenClaw anyway. Clearly these tools does NOT work as stated.
what a company with really bad customer practices. I'm really glad I moved entirely to open source models. if you're disgusted by these practices as I am, I really recommend you use opencode (or any of the other 20 agents) and the GLM 5.1, or Kimi K2.6 or Deepseek V4 Pro models. You will be shocked how effective they are.
haven't used claude in about 2 weeks and I do not miss it.
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the most relevant person on this industry Theo - t3.gg /s
I think that’s an ok move, definitely better than canceling code on pro users for example, I would support to even have a new pricing tier only for openclaw, so they don’t ruin the usage on others. I noticed the ones who use claude code usually are software developers or sysadmins, meanwhile most openclaw ones are your average HR stacy and lazy middle managers, so yeah, it should be a separate tier for them.
So what's next ... they are going to charge you a 30% commission on your sales for products build with their tools?
Surely they can just ask Claude Code to fix this? After all, coding is a solved problem right?
openClaw does so muhc more then Claude code tbh, running 9 agents from the one machine, schedual some tasks, add some personal personas for each agent, claudeCode (which i like alot) is on rails, openClaw is full openworld.
rate the analogy plz..
I have two comments. One this feels like anti-competitive behavior that should not be accepted or allowed. Two, how can people support this?
There are multiple comments in this thread with comments along the line of: "Oh im sure they didn't mean to, let's not attribute this to malice". There is a long history here of lawyers, back and forth between OpenCode and OpenClaw and various other "Open" harnesses. Digging into my commit history and blocking access based off of a string is not acceptable for a product in my opinion -- and I don't think this was purely on accident.
Other comments calling out that they are compute constrained and need to do this in order to continue functioning. They shouldn't oversell then. I think that overselling airline tickets is abhorrent and so is overselling any product in a way that you know that you will impact legitimate customers. Up your pricing and/or stop accepting invites, we will quickly get to the bottom of it.
A company does not deserve the benefit of the doubt over and over and over again.
Everyday they make dislike them even more