Anthropic temporarily suspended OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger's account on April 10, 2026, citing suspicious activity, then reinstated it hours later after his post about the ban went viral on X. The suspension followed Anthropic's recent announcement that Claude subscriptions would no longer cover third-party agent tools like OpenClaw, requiring users to pay separately through consumption-based API pricing. Anthropic justified the pricing change by stating subscriptions weren't designed for the compute-intensive usage patterns of AI claws, which run continuous reasoning loops and integrate with third-party tools. The timing coincided with Anthropic rolling out its own competing agent offerings, Cowork and Claude Dispatch, just weeks before the policy change. Steinberger, who works at OpenAI on product strategy, maintains he was complying with the new pricing rules and only uses Claude for testing OpenClaw compatibility, though he says Anthropic sent him legal threats. An Anthropic engineer later told Steinberger the company has never banned anyone specifically for using OpenClaw.
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