I have never heard of this, and cannot be reproduced, and is not according to Anthropic's ToS. And there's a lot of FUD being spread around.
They don't ban Openclaw prompts, each custom LLM application provides a client application id (this is how e.g. Openrouter can tell you how popular Openclaw is, and which models are used the most).
Anthropic just checks for that.
Either me or you are misunderstanding the situation. A comment from the GP link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633867
> This is slightly different from what OpenCode was banned from doing; they were a separate harness grabbing a user’s Claude Code session and pretending to be Claude Code.
> OpenClaw was still using Claude Code as the harness (via claude -p)[0]. I understand why Anthropic is doing this (and they’ve made it clear that building products around claude -p is disallowed) but I fear Conductor will be next.
If Openclaw was still using Claude Code as the harness, I don't know how to reconcile that with "Openclaw is based on the pi framework", which is decidedly NOT claude code.
From what I understand, they still had the Claude Code harness available, but were mostly fully integrated on the pi agent framework, using Claude Code's oauth credentials directly,
Openclaw allows you to effectively “shell out” to another harness for your model calls, while still using Pi as your main agentic harness. This is the claude -p workflow. Tools and skills are injected into Claude and they hack session persistence into it as well.
They also absolutely blocked OpenClaw system prompts from this path in the prior weeks, based purely on keyword detection. Seems they’ve undone that now.
No, if you ran Openclaw using Anthropic API as a provider, or had it use the ‘claude -p’ cli interface, you got an email from Anthropic threatening a ban unless you upgraded billing.
This was widely reported, and happened to me. You probably can’t reproduce it or see it in docs because they seem to have changed the policy.
Claude -p is using Claude cli. How can you know it's my own claw?