One of the most important news items this morning is about Anthropic’s decision to force third-party harnesses (Claws) to pay for compute with tokens (as opposed to being included in monthly subscription plans).
Key take-aways include:
- Claws are here to stay.
- The economics were unsustainable: a single autonomous OpenClaw instance running for a full day could consume $1,000 to $5,000 in equivalent API costs, while Max subscribers were paying just $200 a month.
- Users now face pay-as-you-go rates of $0.50 to $2.00 per task (or standard API pricing at $15/$75 per million tokens for Opus 4.6), representing a 10x to 50x increase over their previous monthly costs.
- The company plans to extend the third-party ban to all external harnesses in the coming weeks.
- Anthropic’s own Claude Code “claw” (accessed through its “channels” plugin) remains included in Pro/Max plans without restriction.
Learn more about Claws – and how to develop your agentic strategy and roadmap – at shellypalmer.com/claws.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.