Anthropic to limit Using third-party harnesses with Claude subscriptions
Starting April 4 at 12pm PT / 8pm BST, you’ll no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw. Instead, they’ll require extra usage.
Your subscription usage still covers all Claude products, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork. To keep using third-party harnesses with your Claude plan, enable extra usage for your account. This will be enforced April 4 starting with OpenClaw, but this policy applies to all third-party harnesses and will be rolled out to more shortly (read more).
To make the transition easier, we’re offering a one-time credit for extra usage equal to $200 on your Team plan. Redeem your credit by April 17. We’re also introducing discounts when you pre-purchase bundles of extra usage (up to 30%) for your team.
We’ve been working to manage demand across the board, but these tools put an outsized strain on our systems. Capacity is a resource we manage carefully and we need to prioritize our customers using our core products. We appreciate your support as we make these changes. I feel they should leave an opening for claws that use the Claude code sdk (like nanoclaw) because they will still operate on behalf of the main user. The same rate limits can apply as for CC, so why not? Or even let us maybe use haiku only with claws? But if this becomes a hassle, I won’t mind giving my $200/month to OpenAI instead. Cuz for whatever reason, they seem to have way higher quotas even in the $20 plan. Time for nanoclaw to add an adapter to work with other SDKs. There’s quite a large misconception that third party harnesses are banned. Anthropic specifically said the agent sdk is still allowed, as long as you build on top of it - you can create really powerful software that drives Claude code in an efficient, performant way other than the raw Claude code terminal app
https://x.com/bcherny/status/2040207998807908432?s=48 Discussion (655 points, 1 month ago, 793 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069299 More recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633396 Does this affect editor integrations that use the SDK for ACP support via claude-agent-acp¹, like Zed's Claude integration and Emacs' agent-shell? -- https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/claude-agent-acp/rele... Could've allowed us to use Haiku, Anthropic be reducing cc limits the same speed they're launching features. Are there any better suggestions or better ways? API direct. $20/mo sub gives you the model access, then pay per-token for what you actually use through your own setup.
You lose the convenience of a UI, but you keep control over how and where you run your prompts.
For code-heavy workflows specifically, Cursor is unaffected since they have their own deal. The real hit is on general-purpose harnesses like OpenClaw.