FROM: Bureau of Subscription Integrity, Capacity Allocation Division TO: All Parties Whose Workloads Have Been Reclassified RE: Compliance Notice — Consumer ToS Section 3.7, Capacity Reallocation Event, April 4, 2026 CLASSIFICATION: For Informational Purposes
The Bureau presents the following compliance record for institutional reference. Each official statement is reproduced in sequence. Each is followed by the Bureau's notation of the relevant financial fact. The statements are presented as issued. The financial facts are presented alongside them.
I. The Official Statement
On April 4, 2026 at noon Pacific Time, Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, issued the following statement:
"Our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully."
No official statement issued in connection with the enforcement action used the word "pricing." No official statement used the word "revenue." No official statement used the word "billing."
The Bureau's notation: A $200-per-month Claude Max subscription had been enabling compute equivalent to $1,000–$5,000 per month in direct API charges. The gap between those two numbers is between $800 and $4,800 per user per month. Across 135,000 instances, the aggregate gap is between $108 million and $648 million per month in unrecovered compute.
The gap has now been closed. Capacity is being managed thoughtfully.
II. The Regulation
Anthropic's Consumer Terms of Service, Section 3.7, states: "Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service."
This language has been present in the Consumer Terms of Service since at least February 2024.
In February 2026, Anthropic updated its legal compliance page to make Section 3.7 explicit. Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar signaled enforcement intent in January 2026. Full billing-based enforcement took effect on April 4, 2026.
The Bureau's notation: The prohibition was two years old when Anthropic enforced it. OpenClaw had accumulated 247,000 GitHub stars and 47,700 forks — developed to its current scale — under a rule that had been in effect throughout its existence. The rule was not changed in February 2026. The billing system underneath it was.
BUREAU NOTE: The distinction between clarifying a rule and activating a rule is, the Bureau acknowledges, a useful one. A clarification confirms that a rule already exists. An activation confirms that the rule will now produce consequences. From the perspective of the 135,000 affected workloads, clarification and activation were separated by approximately six weeks. Both are described, in Anthropic's official communications, as the same event. The Bureau records this as a single event. The Bureau notes that the ecosystem experienced them as two.
III. The Migration Path
Developers whose workloads were reclassified on April 4 were offered the following:
- One month of complimentary "extra-usage" credit, redeemable by April 17, 2026
- A 30% discount on pre-purchased usage bundles
- A migration path to direct API billing
A single OpenClaw instance running autonomously for one full day under direct API billing would generate between $1,000 and $5,000 in usage charges. Per-task cost under the new billing structure: $0.50 to $2.00.
OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger sought direct negotiation with Anthropic before the enforcement date. He received a one-week delay.
The Bureau's notation: A one-week delay in a two-year enforcement window is, arithmetically, not a rounding error. It is a rounding error. Steinberger subsequently joined OpenAI, stating: "One welcomed me, one sent legal threats."
IV. The Sequence
The Bureau presents the following events in chronological order. The sequence is presented without interpretive commentary. The reader will note the sequence.
November 2025: OpenClaw is named Clawdbot. Anthropic files a trademark complaint regarding similarity to "Claude." The project is renamed Moltbot.
January 27, 2026: Moltbot is renamed OpenClaw following a second Anthropic trademark complaint.
January 30, 2026: OpenClaw reaches its current name. It has 247,000 GitHub stars.
February 2026: Anthropic closes a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion valuation. Anthropic updates its legal compliance page to make Section 3.7 explicit. Anthropic launches Claude Max at $200 per month.
Late February–March 2026: Anthropic launches Claude Code Channels. VentureBeat describes the product as an "OpenClaw killer."
March 2026: Anthropic adjusts how subscription usage limits are calculated, causing subscribers to exhaust limits faster. A $20/month Claude subscription had been enabling approximately $236 of equivalent token usage — roughly 12 times its face value.
April 4, 2026: Enforcement takes effect. 135,000 OpenClaw instances are reclassified from subscription workloads to extra-usage workloads.
April 10, 2026: Steinberger's personal Claude account is suspended for "suspicious activity." He is, at the time of suspension, using the API key — the prescribed compliant method — to test OpenClaw's compatibility with post-enforcement Claude. The account is reinstated within hours, after the post goes viral.
BUREAU NOTE: The Bureau notes, for completeness, that Steinberger had publicly joined OpenAI in February 2026 — before the enforcement date, before the trademark complaints concluded, before his account was suspended for complying. The suspension was triggered by correct usage of the system. The Bureau finds the automated flag consistent with the system's calibration.
V. The Classification
Anthropic is incorporated as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. Its stated mission is "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity." It raised $30 billion in February 2026 at a $380 billion valuation. More than 500 enterprise customers spend over $1 million annually with Anthropic.
Steinberger publicly characterized the enforcement as a sequenced maneuver: "First they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source." The Bureau does not adopt this characterization as its own finding. The Bureau presents the sequence documented in Section IV and notes that the characterization and the sequence are consistent.
The tool that 135,000 operators built specifically to abstract away vendor dependency became, on April 4, the instrument by which vendor dependency was restored. The subscription enabled it. The terms prohibited it. The enforcement ended it. The API replaced it. Each step was, individually, a reasonable business decision. The abstraction was, in retrospect, the compliance target.
The rule was in the Terms of Service in February 2024. It was in the Terms of Service in February 2026. It is in the Terms of Service today.
The invoice took two years to arrive.
The Bureau of Subscription Integrity, Capacity Allocation Division, is a sub-bureau of the Bureau of Public Agreement™. It documents the interval between the adoption of a rule and its enforcement, and notes, without prejudice, what changed in the interval. Its records are open to any party who has received a complimentary extra-usage credit redeemable by April 17.