AI company Anthropic recently temporarily banned Peter Steinberger, creator of the third-party tool OpenClaw, from accessing its Claude platform. According to Steinberger's post on social platform X, his account was suspended due to "suspicious" activity. This incident occurred after Anthropic announced last week that Claude subscription services would no longer cover third-party tools including OpenClaw. The company stated this move was to promote its own agent tool Cowork, and it has been dubbed a "claw tax" by the developer community.
Steinberger stated that he had been using the API in compliance with the new pricing rules but was still banned. He questioned the timing of Anthropic's actions, pointing out that the company first integrated popular features into its closed Cowork tool (such as the remote control agent Claude Dispatch), and then restricted the open-source ecosystem through policies. Although Anthropic later restored Steinberger's access, this controversy highlights the growing friction between AI platforms and third-party developers. Notably, Steinberger is currently employed by OpenAI, a competitor of Anthropic, adding further complexity to the incident.
