OpenAI announces subscriptions can be used for OpenClaw

Claw-like agents are token-hungry money sinks, yet many of these agents support (or supported) diverting your OpenAI or Claude subscription to feed your agent. Obviously, this is bad for frontier model providers from a financial standpoint, given how heavily subsidized these plans are if you actually attempt to use a meaningful fraction of your total allotment of tokens. In February, when we last discussed this topic, OpenAI and Anthropic were maintaining some ambiguity as to whether this use case was allowed. This is probably a mix of wanting to be seen as supporting innovation without actually bearing the financial cost of it.

The status quo changed a little with Sam Altman’s tweet yesterday:

you can sign in to openclaw with your chatgpt account now and use your subscription there!

happy lobstering.

I guess it’s not a surprise, given their February acquisition of OpenClaw and hiring of its creator Peter Steinberger. No word on whether your subscription can be used with one of the many other Claw-like agents, of course.

Meanwhile, Anthropic has been cracking down on people using their subscriptions for external agents in as clumsy a way as possible, by regexing the git commit log:

• HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
• Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention “OpenClaw”

So it’s safe to say you shouldn’t be trying to sneak an agent onto your Claude Code subscription anymore.