Anthropic reinstates OpenClaw and third-party agent usage on Claude subscriptions — with a catch

Good news, OpenClaw fans — you can once again use your Claude AI subscription to power the hit, open source, autonomous AI agentic harness! But, there's a big catch with how it's being enacted. A few hours ago, Anthropic announced via its official developer communications account on X, @ClaudeDevs , that it is changing its Claude paid subscription tiers, introducing a new subcategory of "Agent SDK" credits for all paid subscribers, which they can now allocate specifically for "programmatic" uses, including external, third-party agents such as OpenClaw. The move is a major reversal from the Anthropic's policy introduced in early April 2026 that expressly prohibited its AI subscriptions from being used to power these kind of non-Anthropic agents and harnesses, after Anthropic said they caused capacity and service issues. The problem was that some Claude subscribers were paying $20 to $200 per month under Anthropic's Claude Pro and Max subscriptions, but consuming hundreds, even thousands