Recently, AI model company Anthropic temporarily banned Peter Steinberger, the creator of the open-source tool OpenClaw, from accessing its Claude platform. Steinberger posted screenshots on X, showing that his account was suspended due to "suspicious" activity. This occurred after Anthropic announced last week that Claude subscriptions will no longer support third-party tools including OpenClaw, essentially imposing an extra fee on users of such tools, dubbed the "claw tax" by developers.
Anthropic stated that the new policy aims to steer users toward its own AI agent, Cowork, but Steinberger claims he followed the rules and used the API, yet still faced a ban. On social media, he suggested that Anthropic first integrated popular features from open-source into its closed Cowork (such as the remote-control agent Claude Dispatch), then marginalized the open-source ecosystem. Although Steinberger is currently employed by Anthropic's competitor OpenAI, this incident highlights friction between AI platforms and third-party developers.
