Anthropic Limits OpenClaw Access to Subscription Users to Manage Demand and Costs

Millions of OpenClaw users faced severe restrictions earlier this month in April 2026 from Anthropic, the developer of the viral AI agent tool that took the worldwide tech industry by storm in 2026. The Verge reported that Anthropic restricted third-party tools like OpenClaw to manage system strain and start turning a profit, requiring users to pay for subscriptions to use Claude AI to power such agents.

Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, wrote on X that subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of third-party tools and the change manages growth for sustainable customer service.

Over the past few years, most top AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic introduced new subscription tiers for power users, shifted pricing plans for enterprise customers, and took steps like OpenAI introducing in-platform advertisements and Anthropic restricting third-party tools.

Investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into companies like OpenAI and Anthropic for scaling and compute building. 3 trillion between 2024 and 2029, according to Will Sommer, a senior director analyst at Gartner.

Sommer stated that major AI model providers would ideally generate a 25 percent return on invested capital to avoid asset write-downs. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google earn about 25 percent on their overall capital investments, Sommer added, while returns below 12 percent cause institutional capital to lose interest and below 7 percent lead to asset write-downs described as an unmitigated disaster for investors.

Gartner forecasts large AI companies need to earn close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029 to reach 7 percent ROIC, or about $2 trillion per year by the end of the period.

4 trillion in spending before reducing to $600 billion through 2030, per Sommer. One token is generally worth about four characters in English, such as the word 'bathroom' processed as two tokens, with one paragraph in English generally about 100 tokens and a 1,500-word essay about 2,050 tokens per OpenAI estimate.

3 quadrillion tokens in October 2025. Adding all providers’ estimates yields 100 to 200 quadrillion tokens processed per year, Sommer said. To achieve $2 trillion in annual spend, providers need to generate a cumulative 10 sextillion tokens per year by conservative estimates, according to Gartner and Sommer.

Token consumption between now and 2030 would need to grow by 50,000–100,000x assuming a 10 percent profit margin per token, Sommer noted. OpenAI introduced ads within ChatGPT as a separate sidebar, while Anthropic decried OpenAI's ads in its 2026 Super Bowl ads.