Google's Pro service (no idea about ultra and I have no intention to find out) is riddled with 429s. They have generous quotas for sure, but they really give you very low priority. For example, I still dont have access to Gemini 3.1 from that endpoint.
It's completely uncharacteristic of Google.
I analyzed 6k HTTP requests on the Pro account, 23% of those were hit with 429s. (Though not from Gemini-CLI, but from my own agent using code assist). The gemini-cli has a default retry backoff of 5s. That's verifiable in code, and it's a lot.
I dont touch the anti-gravity endpoint, unlike code-assist, it's clear that they are subsidizing that for user acquisition on that tool. So perhaps it's ok for them to ban users form it.
I like their models, but they also degrade. It's quite easy to see when the models are 'smart' and capacity is available, and when they are 'stupid'. They likely clamp thinking when they are capacity strapped.
Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying. I spent a decade at Google, and it's sad to see how they are executing here, despite having solid models in gemini-3-flash and gemini-3.1
> Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying
I think this is the most important takeaway from this thread and at some point, this will end up biting Google and Anthropic back.
OpenAI seems to have realized this and is actively trying to do the opposite. They welcomed OpenCode the same day Anthropic banned them, X is full of tweets of people saying codex $20 plan is more generous than Anthropic's $200 etc.
If you told me this story a year ago without naming companies, I would tell you it's OpenAI banning people and Google burning cash to win the race.
And it's not like their models are winning any awards in the community either.
It's unfortunate though that they lie and deceive by having a name called "Open"AI when they are in fact "Closed". And the whole non-profit to profit and Microsoft deals are just untrustable and unethical.
They also actively employ dark strategies in cooperation with CIA and who knows when they will pull the rug under you again.
Do you really trust a foundational rotten group of people who avoid accountability?
I'm guessing at least 50% of the "users" of Antigravity are actually OpenCode users exploiting the oauth and endpoint. Must be infuriating to them if they're subsidizing it.
The OpenCode plugin (8.7k stars btw!) even advertises "Multi-account support — add multiple Google accounts, auto-rotates when rate-limited"[1]
I'd rather use Chinese models like Kimi K2.5 or Minimax M2.5 for personal agents at this point. They are almost as smart but 10x cheaper and their attitude towards subscribers is use where you want.
> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product.
I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.
Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?
Considering the tremendous amount of tokens OpenClaw can burn for something that has nothing to do with sofware development, I think it's reasonable for Google to not allow using tokens reserved for Antigravity. I don't think there's such a restriction if you pay for the API out of pocket.
So the issue is the same as Anthropic. They do charge for it though their API. The users, however, want to use the discounted "unlimited" flat rate through the first-party app instead, then get mad when they are told they have to use the same API every other third-party app does.
No, the problem is that the discounted rate exists in the first place. Essentially these are unfair business practices, product cross subsidization to ensure market dominance. See also: Microsoft and a whole bunch of other companies.
And once they've got their monopoly position there is inevitably the rug-pull. I wonder if some CPO somewhere actually had the guts to put a 'rug pull' item on the product roadmap.
It's not unfair its how every business works. When your product is new or not yet good enough and you want people to try it you give them discounts, or if you want to drive traffic to your service you also do the same.
Even traditional businesses do this with coupons. Is it unfair that Costco sells chickens for under cost because it drives usage to them?
Companies like Uber did use massive funding and price subsidization to try and kill competition and then take a monopoly, but it is hard to assert that this is what google is doing now. And given that other competitors in the space, Anthropic are doing the exact same thing again its not as though they are alone.
Also they could be subsidizing it because they want that usage type as it helps them train models better.
Chatgpt and gpt4 were all ran at a loss and subsidized people just didn't know that. Almost all of the llm companies have been selling 1 dollar of llm compute for 50 cents as they valued the usage, training data, and users more than making profit now.
This next generation of MOE and other newly trained models. Like opus 4.6, Cursor Composer 1.5, gpt 5.3 codex, and many of the others have been the first models where these companies are actually profitably serving the tokens at the api cost.
This year has been the switch where ai companies are actually thinking of becoming profitable instead of just focusing on research and development.
> Essentially these are unfair business practices, product cross subsidization to ensure market dominance.
Offering a different discounted rate for a service, though their first-party platform is not an unfair business practice whatsoever, though. The bar isn't what you disagree with, or what you think their motives are without any substantial proof. They could even make a honest argument that they can aggressively key-value cache default prompts from their own software reducing inference costs.
>See also: Microsoft and a whole bunch of other companies.
And in this case the subsidy is paid for by tied sales from other users that don't actually use the service, which is another illegal business practice.
"PAYGO API access" vs "Monthly Tool Subscription" is just a matter of different unit economics; there's nothing particularly unusual or strange about the idea on its own, specific claims against Google notwithstanding.
Of course, Google is still in the wrong here for instantly nuking the account instead of just billing them for API usage instead (largely because an autoban or whatever easier, I'm sure).
Just because all you can eat buffet exists doesn't mean that the food is free or you can take away the food. The food exists in discounted rate only if you consider it unlimited food. For normal folks they make profit.
Claude code could possibly make profit because the average usage doesn't come close to exhausting the limits.
However someone else said this, and I agree, if I have an AI use my claude-code CLI how is not valid first-party app use? It would be different if they would disallow others to use your claude-code account, and I think most including these AI companies would argue AI is supposed to replace and augment humans. So they aren't banning AI's from using the CLI, right- though thats what some of them are seemingly wanting to do.
Google wants usage that earns them street cred, not usage from bots who will never evaluate the output. They're all fighting tooth and nail to acquire customers, both free and paid... they didn't want their giveaways to be burned.
But banning accounts wholesale is not going to earn them more customers. They could have just disabled Gemini access, or even given a warning first.
I don't use OpenClaw, I do pay hundreds per month for AI subscriptions, and I will not be giving that money to Google while they treat their customers like this.
Yep it sounds like Google is charging too little, and taking losses that would be unsustainable for other companies, to try and win the market on AI coding products. Which is a violation of anti trust law, I think. Now that people are using their pricing in an unexpected way where their product isn’t the one winning from their anti competitive practices, they’re punishing the users. Classic monopolistic behavior. And why we need to tax mega corp more and break them up.
What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM.
All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product.
And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?
There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you.
This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).
I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.
I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones.
Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
Businesses do not have an entitlement to profit. Suspending customers for using a fairly expensive subscription plan -- especially forfeiting an annual prepayment for a day or two of coloring outside the lines -- sure does make Google appear entitled to profit without ever risking its own pricing model.
> Suspending customers for using a fairly expensive subscription plan -- especially forfeiting an annual prepayment for a day or two of coloring outside the lines
they're being suspended for using a private api outside of the app for which the api was intended. If you make a clone of the hbo app, so that you can watch hbo shows without ads by logging in with your discounted ads-included membership, your account will also be suspended.
The facts are straightforward, even without analogies. But since we're using them...
You are at the grocery store, checking out. The total comes to $250. You pay, but then remember you had a coupon. You present it to the cashier, who calls the manager over. The manager informed you that you've attempted to use an expired coupon, which is a violation of Paragraph 53 subsection d of their Terms of Service. They keep your groceries and your $250, and they ban you from the store.
Google is acting here like it was entitled to a profitable transaction, and is even entitled to punish anyone who tries to make it a losing transaction. But they're not the police. No crime was committed.
Regular businesses win some and lose some. A store buys widgets for $10 and hopes to sell them for $20, but sometimes they miscalculate and have to unload them for $5. Overall they hope their winners exceed their losers. That's business.
my point wasn't an analogy. the facts are that it is a private api being used with a subscription service. neither hbo nor google are required to do business with people that abuse the api.
We are in violent agreement about that point. Where we seem to disagree is that I don't think they're entitled to also keep the customer's annual subscription payment when they've decided they want out of the contract.
Equally, customers are not entitled to make set the terms, or pricing decisions for businesses. They can always move their custom elsewhere if they disagree with ToS or pricing.
No, this is hilarious: company that rams their AI down your throat at every opportunity then turns around and shuts down your account because you actually use their AI... there is no limit to the idiocy around Google's AI roll-out. I wished I could donate the AI credits that I'm paying for (thanks Google for that price increase for a product I never chose to buy) to the people that need them more.
So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?
Google is a company well down the path of enshittification, they even got rid of their motto "Don't be evil".
As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.
When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.
NotebookLM seems to be the only exception, or it could be an acquisition.
Subscription API ban could be part of a larger strategy because of OpenClaw’s association with OpenAI and Google will not be able to copy OpenClaw Personal Assistant model due to the security implications.
Pay as you go through API pricing is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce mass adoption of a product. Pay per month works on consumption patterns where 80% of the users will barely use the product to compensate for the other 10 or 20% power users.
> TFA most commonly refers to Trifluoroacetic acid, a highly persistent, mobile "forever chemical" (PFAS) found globally in water and soil, widely used in organic chemistry as a solvent.
Don’t know about your parent, but I am certainly on of those “AI can’t make anyone more productive”.
Well, at least I would say that while being a bit hyperbolic. But folks like us who prefer to see claims by corporations trying to sell you stuff backed by behavioral research before we start taking the corporation’s word for it.
But surely your search engine must have given you the answer within your first three clicks, if not, perhaps you should consider a better search engine.
The irony is that web searches for an explanation of something often lead to a discussion thread where the poster is downvoted and berated for daring to ask people instead of Google. And then there's one commenter who actually actually explains the thing you were wondering about.
How about giving the user a big warning to not do that and then block the account if the user continues. This total blocks are crazy. Especially for people who use their Google account for 20+ years or something.
Google's bundling of so many services into one account is becoming a gargantuan liability for them & their users.
This "zero tolerance" policy is just absurdly mega-goliath out of touch with the world. The sort of soulless brain dead corporatism that absolutely does not think for even a single millisecond about its decisions, that doesn't care about anything other than reducing customer support or complexity, no matter what the cost.
Kicking people off their accounts for this is Google being willing to cause enormous untoward damage. With basically not even the faintest willingness to try to correct. Gobsmacking vicious indifference, ok with suffering.
Basically Google is saying: You can't use Gemini with OAuth on other products than Google products (Anti Gravity).
I mean it's fair, just should have been documented properly and the possibility to use Gemini through OAuth restricted with proper scope instead of saying you broke the ToS we ban your 350$/ month account.
Can openclaw go through gemini-cli? Because they can and nobody would notice anything has changed. It would use the same OAuth down the line and consume the same quotas.
I'd assume API usage through tokens vs. OAuth are rate limited differently? I don't actually see hard numbers for Antigravity model rate limits on their website so guessing this is the case.
That’s my question too. Presumably one could even build an API that just runs things in cli? How would they plan to restrict that? Based on usage patterns?
Terms of Service that span multiple pages of legalese and require an attorney to parse, for something that is either 'free' or a few $ per month, and can result in loss of service across multiple product lines, AND has binding lopsided arbitration requirements, is not only draconian, it is unconscionable.
Look at how messed up this is: Google Attorneys, paid hundreds of $/hour, spending hours and hours putting together these "Terms of Service" on one side, and a simple consumer on the other side, making a few $ per hour, not trained in legalese, expected to make a decision on a service that is supposed to cost a few $ a month, and if you make an honest mistake, can cause you a lot of trouble in your life.
It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling. Don’t want to use their tooling? Pay the API rates. The API is sitting right there, ready to use for a broader range of purposes.
It’s only unreasonable if you think the customer has a right to have their cake and eat it too.
> It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling.
Yes, because you are giving them your data. So you're not actually paying for usage. What they should do instead is be upfront about why this is subsidized and/or not subsidize it in the first place.
I think the permaban without notification on first violation (that most violators likely weren't even aware was a violation) is unreasonable. This should almost certainly be illegal if it is not already under the DSA or similar, particularly for a monopolist of Google's scale.
What about this ban is anticompetitive? The only think I can think of is accusing them of dumping product (as opposed to price discrimination), in which case the remedy is going to be to making them charge the API price for everything.
The issue with them being a monopolist is less about competition and more about the fact them penalizing you on one of their products can result in them deleting you from the Internet. You can lose decades of email history, the ability to publish apps on over half of the mobile devices on the globe, etc.
In Europe the Digital Services Act (DSA) is beginning to set expectations, particularly for large platforms about not just clear documentation of their terms, but also a meaningful human appeal process with transparency and communication requirements for actions taken.
The DSA is more focused on social networks, but if you were to apply the concepts of the DSA to this story, Google would have violated it several times over.
Tradition warrants a negotiation phase when one party wishes to change the terms of an agreement, or becomes cognizant that the counterparty may wish to do the same.
The tech industry has gorged on non-participation in this facet of contract law, instead resorting to all or nothing clickwrap, which is, barring existential or egregious circumstances, unwarranted, and in my opinion, is fundamentally unreasonable, and should be an invalid exercise of contract law. Especially given the size of one of the party's in comparison to the other.
> Tradition warrants a negotiation phase when one party wishes to change the terms of an agreement, or becomes cognizant that the counterparty may wish to do the same.
They didn't change the agreement. One party violated it, and the other party withdrew as a result.
This is so vanilla. But people will moan because they want subsidized tokens.
A flat rate is always a mixture of low usage people subsidizing high usage people. It's disgusting that these companies want to have the advantages of subs, but then straight up ban any high usage people. Basically, there is no flatrate.
The punishment, of being kicked out of your Google account for a zero-tolerance first offense, is completely unreasonable, is incredibly extreme Lawful Evil alignment.
The damage to individuals that Google is willing to just hand out here, to customers they have had for decades, who have their lives built around Google products, is absurd. This is criminally bad behavior and whatever the terms of service say, this is an affront to the dignity of man. This is evil. And beyond any conceivable reason.
Yes; because they have no obligation to provide this service tier at all.
It could be API prices for anyone, everywhere. They offer a discounted plan, $200/mo., for a restricted set of use cases. Abuse that at your peril.
It’s like complaining your phone’s unlimited data plan is insufficient to run an apartment building with all units. I was told it was Unlimited! That means I can totally run 500 units through it if I want to, Verizon!
You can run an entire apartment block off of a single sim card/phone line. The (technical) problem is that you are purchasing an insufficient amount of bandwidth. It goes without saying that a limited bandwidth integrated over a finite service period comes out to a limited amount of data, so the term is misleading.
If google has no obligation to provide the service tier, then they should stop providing it instead of providing it under false terms.
This is like if everyone in a city decided to take baths instead of showers, so the municpal water supply decided to ban baths instead of properly segmenting their service based on usage.
Service providers don't have the right to discriminate what their service is used for.
I don't think that's an apt metaphor. You bought one general water supply, like an API user. If they sold a "no baths" cheaper option I'd be fine with them banning baths to those customers.
Google's API does let you use any client.
The gemini/antigravity clients are a different (subscription) service. When you reverse engineer the clients and use their internal auth/apis you will typically have very different access patterns to other clients (eg: not using prompt caching), and this is likely showing up in their metrics.
This isn't unusual. A bottomless drink at a restaurant has restrictions: it's for you to drink, not to pass around to others at the table (unless they buy one too). You can't pour it into bottles to take large quantities home, etc. And it's priced accordingly: if sharing/bottling was allowed the price would have to increase.
Lmao no. You cannot use your common sim card for that. It's for an individual and they will cut your service and justifiably so, if they figure out that's what you're using it for.
If you buy a sim card built for that purpose sure, but then you'll be paying...biz prices!
This isn't really that hard to figure out people. So much outrage in comments on this. Self entitlement to the max from people who really haven't lifted a finger to stop the corporate overlords anyway.
So, if I use my SIM card 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, Ill get banned? Doesn’t that seem absurd? The SIM card is enforcing one voice call at a time. If the apartment building has to wait in line to use it, what’s the difference?
If you deployed it in a way that did multiplexing such that multiple users could use it at once, then sure—-Business time. But otherwise…
I can do it pretty easily. The restriction in both cases is so easily overcome it is ridiculous to build your buisness model around it and disrespectful to the customer's intellect.
I don't understand how this can be enforced without ridiculous levels of false positives. I'm truly baffled. The same with Claude Code situation.
gemini-cli, claude-code, codex etc, they ALL have a -p flag or equivalent, which is non-interactive IO interface for their LLM inference.
If I wire my tooling (or openclaw) to use the -p flag (or equivalents), is that allowed?
Okay, maybe they get rid of the -p flag and I have to use an interactive session. I can then just use OS IO tooling to wire OpenClaw with their cli. Is that allowed?
How does sending requests directly to the endpoints that their CLI is communicating with suddenly make their subsidized plans expensive? Is it because now I can actually use my 100% quota? If that's so, does it mean their products are such that their profitability stands on people not using them?
The direct answer is their clients play extra nice with their backend.
Specifically all optimize caching.
The indirect answer is for everyone using third party tools to play about there are 10x using it to spam or malicious use cases hammering their backend far cheaper than if it was by API.
These people are the false positives in this situation, but whether Google or Claude care is unlikely. They're happy to ban you and expect you to sign up for the API.
This has always been a worry when you use a service like Google.
if i understand correctly, they even have a wrapper around it to make it easier to use: the Claude Agent SDK
the thing that's disallowed is pretending you're the claude binary, logging in through OAuth
in other words, if you use some product thats not Claude Code, and your browser opens asking you to "give Claude Code access to your account", you're in hot water
as for how they detect it: they say they use heuristics and usage patterns. if something falls wildly out of the distribution it's a ban.
my take is that the problem is not the means of detection. that's fine and seems to work well. the problem is that its an instant outright ban. they should give you a couple warning emails, then a timeout, etc.
The heuristic detection approach is fine. The penalty ladder is broken.
Reasonable progression: warning email → quota throttle → AI Pro subscription suspended → Google account suspended.
They skipped to step 4 on a first offense, paid account, no appeal. That's not a terms enforcement system, that's a hostage situation. "Comply or lose your digital life."
The real lesson isn't "don't use OpenClaw." It's: never let one company own your primary identity infrastructure.
For a specific harness, they've all found ways to optimize to get higher cache hit rates with their harness. Common system prompts and all, and more and more users hitting cache really makes the cost of inference go down dramatically.
What bothers me about a lot of the discussion about providers disallowing other harnesses with the subscription plans around here is the complete lack of awareness of how economies of scale from common caching practices across more users can enable the higher, cheaper quotas subscriptions give you.
There are examples of labs banning these use cases for sure, as well as the presence of terms and conditions allowing them to ban you for merely “competing” with them. If you’re building, it could be worth locking in a contract first.
I feel like it's about data quality. They want humans using the tools because that data is valuable and helps them improve the product. AI's using their product like OpenClaw makes their training missions harder. And even if you opt-out of training, they are still using your data for non-training purposes (you can't open out of that) and that human data is valuable.
They're in the wrong business then. They're selling peak automation software, with the sales pitch of 'have AI do your work while you sleep'.
Are they banning their core offering? Are Ralph' loops also banned for building software? Because I can drain my quota with a simple bash loop faster than any OpenClaw instance.
The buffet analogy breaks down here. Using OpenClaw isn't stuffing steaks in your bag — you're eating the same food, in the same seat, consuming the same tokens your subscription allows. Google banned you because they didn't like the plate you brought. Then took your house key as punishment.
The steaks-in-bag analogy would apply if you were somehow extracting MORE than your quota. You're not. You're just routing the same tokens differently.
Not sure if this is sarcasm, but I'll respond as if it isn't. Having worked my entire career to date in the SaaS business, it is well known in some verticals that a large portion of revenue comes from companies that literally do not know they have purchased your product. And when you have a large customer like that, people are very careful to walk quietly and not do anything to notify them. I've seen it happen quite a few times.
But the question is - why is the -p flag fine? It hits the same endpoints with the same OAuth token and same quotas.
Comments section here and on related news from Anthropic seems to be centered around the idea that the reason for these bans is that it burns tokens quickly, while their plans are subsidized. What changes with the -p flag? You're just using cli instead of HTTP.
Are the metrics from their cli more valuable than the treasure trove of prompt data that passes through to them either way that justifies this PR?
I don't know why people here can't accept the simple fact that AI companies are offering cheap "unlimited" plans as a loss leader to tie you to their ecosystem, and then make up for it via add-ons, upsells, ads etc. If you use those API tokens to access external services it defeats the purpose. The hack may have worked so far, mainly because no one was checking, but they are all going to tighten the access eventually (as Anthropic and Google have already done).
Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.
OpenAI and the Chinese companies let you all you can eat openly. Anthropic's lead vs OAI is slight and these things are going to homogenize quickly. The market is going open and the people trying to keep it closed are just generating ill will pointlessly.
>OpenAI and the Chinese companies let you all you can eat openly.
You say this, but I guarantee that when they do offer a plan similar to Google/Anthropic's dedicated coding "unlimited" subscription, they will do the exact same thing. Maybe they will let OpenClaw in as a first party because of their partnership with the creator.
But none of these are unlimited, that was never the expectation. It's a flat rate for a flat (but hidden) amount of usage. What's disgusting is that they want the good parts of subs (low usage subs), but then just ban the bad parts (high usage people). I don't care whether that's technically possible, it's incredibly scummy.
When reading HN I get the impression that a lot of people are convinced monthly plans are very profitable for the companies, I don’t have any numbers but to me it always seemed like a bait and switch or ”bait and make you pay with your data too”.
I'll bite. I suspect that these plans aren't as intensely subsidized as people assume. I believe that API usage is probably also not subsidized at all. First, yes, subs are probably subsided, but I bet a significant % of users are profitable to serve, especially the "chat" users who don't use dev tools and have short context window conversations. Yes, I think the subs also exist as a driver to get lock-in and market share. Claude Code, for example, is very good and I stopped using their competition when they released their superior product.
That said, I assume that (1) their long-term goal is to create cheaper-to-serve models that fit within their pricing targets, and use the (temporarily) subsidized subscriptions to find the features and costs that best serve the market. Maybe even while capturing more margin on the API in comparison (eg keep API prices high while lowering cost to serve a token). I've largely stopped using Opus, and sometimes even chose to use Haiku, because the cheaper models are fast and usually serves my needs. It's very possible to work all-day and barely hit the usage limits with Haiku on the $20/mo option. Long term, that could be profitable outright.
And (2) subscriptions with lower SLOs than API calls have the potential to provide "infill" usage for high fixed-cost GPUs as an alternative to idling, similar to their batch APIs. I'd believe that overnight usage limits could/should be higher than during California work-hours. I assume most big providers have pre-paid fixed cost servers, so pumping more tokens through an otherwise idle GPU is "free". They can also do a lot more cost-optimization behind the scenes, such as prompt caching, to reduce the cost of tokens.
I'm very confused here. The monthly plans are meant to be used inside of Google's walled garden, but people are somehow able to capture (?) and re-use the oAuth token?
Regardless, I thought it was pretty obvious that things like OpenClaw require an API account, and not a subsidized monthly plan.
Exactly, OpenClaw (or I think possibly an addon/extension or unofficial method) is allowing Googles Antigravity authentication to connect the app. This allows for 'unlimited' calls through Antigravity models with a subscription, instead of the proper Gemini/Google AI Studio API key method (charged per million tokens)
API usage can get very high for automatic operations, especially with apps like Kilo/Roo/Cline, and now with OpenCode/OpenClaw. I often blast through $10-20 in a single day of just regular OpenCode usage through OpenRouter
If I could pay a subscription and get near unlimited use (with rate limits), of course I'd do that, but not like this. I'm pretty sure Antigravity has ToU somewhere that indicates it's only allowed for use in Antigravity and nowhere else, since I've seen other threads on this happening: https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50
This is exactly why API-level access matters more than consumer subscriptions for production workloads. Consumer plans are subsidized with the assumption of interactive, low-volume usage. The moment you programmatically route through them, you break the economic model they're built on.
The real issue is the lack of transparency. If Google's ToS says 'no programmatic access via third-party tools,' state it clearly and enforce it with warnings first. An instant ban with no recourse is hostile to paying customers who may genuinely not know where the line is.
For anyone building production systems, the lesson is clear: use the actual API tiers, budget for it, and treat consumer subscriptions as evaluation tools only.
>This is exactly why API-level access matters more than consumer subscriptions for production workloads. Consumer plans are subsidized with the assumption of interactive, low-volume usage. The moment you programmatically route through them, you break the economic model they're built on.
EXACTLY.
Google also did this when DALL-E Mini and Stable Diffusion got big.
It seems that this comment was written with some AI tool. Curious to know — are you an OpenClaw instance?
Your profile seems to be an ad for some tool you or your owner/administrator created:
> Building EvoLink (https://evolink.ai) - a unified AI API gateway for 40+ models. We help developers save 20-70% on AI API costs with smart routing and automatic failover. Previously worked on AI infrastructure and growth.
Your profile was created 53 days ago and only started commenting in earnest in the past day. Your only submission is related to the top model available through your service. All comments are somehow related to that topic too.
/me squints at the ironic em dash in "Curious to know — are you an OpenClaw instance?"
But in good faith: they (HN staff) said in another comment I can't find just now that they're discussing what to do about it, but I can't think of any palatable easy answers.
In fact, the only easy answer I can think of is banning all accounts newer than 2022, but then how do you onboard new users? Captcha for every new comment? Do we have good AI-defeating captchas now?
Well, I love my em dashes. Won’t ever give those up! You can pry them from my cold dead hands.
No, I am not OpenClaw or an AI.
I see comments like this a lot. I don’t comment on them unless the profile seems to be an advert for exactly what the AI-generated comment is talking about (which is definitely the case here).
I’m not sure if you “feel” the AI nature of the GP comment, but to me it’s very strong. I pray my writing doesn’t “feel” the same to someone reading it. If it does we’re in a much worse spot than I thought!
Although I myself am not sure whether this is a real person or a bot, the point seems to be at least somewhat valid to me. I think that some people have become too accustomed to the idea that they can get good things for free or at a reduced price, without thinking about how the economy of production/service they rely on works.
It is funny that my first reaction to your post was that you are crazy, but then I looked at his comment history and you are completely right. Boy this is not a good development. I don’t want to spend my time reading AI generated comments.
Clearly this comment relevant to the tool the profile is selling as a kind of ‘submarine’ ad… profile was created 53 days ago (so no green tag) but only started commenting in earnest 12 hours ago (almost as if the account was farmed).
And the comment is full of AI tropes that seem highly generated.
It’s clearly AI generated when you see 3 comments of similar style posted in the same minute.
Anyways ignore the people downvoting you, I don’t want to read AI generated comments even if they are seemingly reasonable. I appreciate you flagging the comment for me, I didn’t even suspect it. I can make my own AI generated content if I want it, I want to read thoughts and ideas from actual humans.
This is the first time in recent memory that software has had high variable costs so the surprise at these rules is understandable.
In this case, a the difference in context cache hit rate between openclaw and antigravity.
For example if openclaw starts every message with the current time hh:mm:ss at the top of the context window, followed by the full convo history, it would have a cache hit rate if ~0. Simply moving the updated time to each new message incrementally would increase hit rate to over 90%. Idk if openclaw does this but there’s many many optimizations like this. And worse, thrashing the cache has non linear effects on the server as more and more users’ cached contexts get evicted from cache due to high cardinality. The cost to serve difference could be >10x.
Google is the furthest behind on coding agent adoption and has all the incentives to allow off policy use to grow demand. But it would probably be better to design their own optimized openclaw and serve that for free than let any unoptimized requests in.
It's a fair point, but I think people are thinking too much about 'cost' and 'subsidies' and just the fact that everyone is so compute stretched.
While it's sort of the same thing, I think it's much more a symptom of not enough compute vs some 'dump cheap tokens' on the market strategy.
One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute.
It doesn't make sense to me that given the absolutely brutal competition any of these companies would block use of 3rd party apps unless they had to. They clearly have enough cash, so I don't think it's about money - I think it's that an indicator that Google and Anthropic are really struggling with keeping up with demand. Given Anthropics reliability issues last week this does not surprise me.
> One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute.
Or, pessimistically, it could indicate they’re burning cash hoping the subsidized access will eventually result in someone giving them a product idea they can build and resell at a profit.
If they let *claw (or third party coding agents, or whatever) run for six more months and in those months figure out how to sell a safe substitute and then cut off access, maybe it will have been worth it.
I would add though that many are also being caught up in antispam efforts.
I.e. that for every legimate OpenClaw user doing something trivial with their account misusing the sub. There is probably 10x using it to send spam emails and spam comments.
I suspect from googles perspective some of these people are just a rounding error.
That said I use API where I should and the sub in the first party apps. Perhaps I'm too much of a goody two shoes but AI already feels such an overwhelming value prop for me I don't care.
That said I think you're right in that money matters here but I think the subs as they intend people to use them is hugely profitable i.e. the people doing 10 chats per work day and a few in the evening but paying £20 per month.
Google, unlike all their competitors, actually give Cloud API credits to all paying users of AI Pro and AI Ultra [1] - just use those for direct Gemini/Vertex API access instead of trying to hack the OAuth of Google's apps.
Edit: I have misread some of the comments here, he didn't lose access to his whole account and data just the antigravity part. I should've done my due diligence, get out of bed and spent more time thinking instead of emotionally reacting. Guess the rage machine got me as well. Damn. I think this thread might be hijacked by ai bros.
The main point still stands, google is part of a duopoly that runs the world. You can't be a functional member of society without them. They're like a public utility and plays too big of a role in people's life to take decisions based on unknown internal policies. They're long overdue for a government intervention or for splitting up.
Google needs to be dismantled. A lot of us on HN have been calling for this for years now.
Can we start saying it in unison to legislators and the press? Please?
If you're in the EU, do your part too.
This company taxes the URL bar. It owns 92% of them and turns trademarks they don't own into forced bidding wars. There's no way to access any brand without paying Google extortion fees.
This company removed AdBlock.
This company controls 50% of mobile - the most important device category and devices we own and pay for - and now they're removing our ability to use them as we please. More taxation, more Google services, every app and search through the Google troll toll. You can't even order from a restaurant anymore without one of these things and Google lords over it.
They own your digital life. They own infrastructure. They own discovery. They own every touch point.
They are too big.
Anthropic and OpenAI are having to pay out the nose for 60% of users to even access them, meanwhile Google sings "lalalala" and forced their AI products onto users at no cost.
Break them up now.
Do it horizontally, not vertically: instead of splitting off Chrome and Search and YouTube, create Google A, Google B, Google C ... Make them split all the same pieces and make them all compete with each other.
That is fair for the consumer. That is fair for competition.
That is the most capitalistic friendly thing to do. Because right now Google is an invasive species in every market destroying the entire competitive ecology.
Best way to deal with this is take them to small claims court. If enough people do this, They have to send representations that will cost them enough to stop such nonsense.
>Can you begin to imagine losing access to all your emails, accounts, every photo you ever took? Because what they didn't like how you used one unrelated product tied to your account?
What are you talking about? He didn't lose access to Google, in fact, he is using his Google account to make the post. He lost access to the service they are claiming that he is misusing.
Yes especially if you have a developer account. Sometimes an app rejection did result losing not just the entire google account but also the developer's private google account.
It's absurd and shameful. If only for the fact of banning individual consumers paying $249/month without warning, completely rendering them unable to use the service they paid for, including through the official app.
Just the 1000th instance of disgusting behavior by US big tech.
This is a serious problem. I think the only durable solution is legislation that requires these companies to provide access to your data, or at least a way to export or transfer it, even after an account ban. Otherwise, if they delete your account for any reason, even for a legitimate policy violation, they can effectively cut you off from information you have built up and stored over years. In Apple’s case, an account lock can even leave a device unusable.
I have read several blog posts from people describing how frustrating it is to have an account locked. Because Google, like many large companies, provides little to no effective support, the only thing that seemed to work was getting a post to trend on Hacker News so that someone inside Google noticed and intervened to resolve it.
Fine, restrict the OpenClaw usage. Fine, cancel the AI Pro subscription. But nuking Gmail, Google Photos, Drive — years of irreplaceable personal data — as punishment for how you routed tokens? That's not enforcement, that's collective punishment.
No bank closes your checking account because you used your debit card at a competitor's ATM.
The offense and the penalty are in completely different weight classes. That's what makes this indefensible regardless of whether the policy itself is legitimate.
Google does give you a way to export data partially if your account is banned.
But that's still not enough. I can't easily reconstruct this data in a way that will be usable to me, not without having something like Gemini build a UI for me. Oh wait.
Of course Google can restrict how their API is accessed. But locking paid accounts with no warning, no explanation email, and no functioning support path while continuing to charge $249/month is a different problem entirely. A reasonable enforcement process would have been a warning email, grace period to stop using the tool, then restriction.
What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.
Their "API" isn't what's being accessed here. As far as I understand it's using their subscription account oauth token in some third party app that's the issue here.
I was using Antigravity the proper way, but why would I risk my account using this subpar software? OpenClaw and Opencode literally obfuscate the API call exactly like Antigravity calls it. Do you really trust Google to only catch misuse using this dragnet?
So a Google AI pro/ultra account is intended to be used from their cli or tools (like their open-gravity agent front end).
Their API usage isn't included in these plans, although under the hood open-gravity uses the API.
People have been using the API auth credential intended for anti-gravity with open claw, presumably causing a significant amount of use and have been caught.
The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the them.
I don’t think either OpenAI or Anthropic any API use in their ‘pro’ plans either?
This reminds me of the customers of “unlimited broadband” of yesteryear getting throttled or banned for running Tor servers.
> The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the users.
I can’t recall any success story of Google’s support team or process coping with a consumer’s situation, many have been posted here. this isn’t a new outcome, just a new cause
I do want to understand what’s happening with the $250/mo fees of users caught in this. will it be automatically cancelled at some point?
Google deciding to willy nilly unilaterally ban my 20+ year old primary Google account is probably my greatest internet fear, given how famously awful their support is. Seems like it's the singular best example of a tech company so big that through some combination of internal silos and TOS bureaucracy you have no shot of getting your account back, no matter how unreasonable the ban actually is.
A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.
> A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.
I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too
the only safe way is to get your important data out of Google entirely
after manifest v3's announcement, I de-googled: gmail, chrome, search, google cloud, photos, family on android phones
> I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too
Related: I've had a suspicion that, if you have an Apple or Google app developer account through a company (in your name and recovery phone number, but company email address)... and you leave the company... you'd better hope that someone at the company doesn't then use the account to do something sketchy or rule-breaking.
Someone inheriting the account is a very real possibility, given motive (people can be lazy about figuring out how to set up the account for another developer, or not want to pay another fee), and opportunity (professionalism norm is to preserve all passwords/secrets in a way that is accessible to the company).
> There's an entire mesh of metrics that are used to calculate your relation to separate accounts.
> It's the confidence tolerance that keeps you and your partner from getting banned together.
Thanks for that bit of info, the degree of disgusting that google would be tracking who people's partners are is off the scale invasive and should be a reason for an immediate complaint to the various data privacy authorities.
Thus spake the Googler... sorry, but I think I understand it just fine, I think it is you that is not understanding it properly but since your salary depends on not understanding it properly I won't blame you for that.
Which is exactly why I de-Googled much of my digital life (email, notes, password management, photos, chatbot, browser etc) except where there is no reasonable/practical alternative. The "main" account is only for those things and for old contacts in case someone reaches me via the old email. I use a secondary Google account for anything that is remotely risky.
This is a major reason I haven't worked with Gemini much. Too many eggs in that basket to mess with it. Anthropic and OpenAI at least have no other baggage for me.
Friendly reminder that Google Takeout [1] exists. When I read a story a few years ago about a guy who had his primary Google account banned with no recourse (for reselling Pixel phones) and permanently lost 20 years worth of emails and family photos, I researched and found Takeout and used it to back up all my data, then subsequently stopped using Google services altogether (apart from YouTube).
Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google
I've never had a problem with Google Takeout the multiple times I've used it. Perhaps try making the compressed files smaller (You can choose to make them 1gb or greater, last time I used it), you might need to download 75 files, but it's better than 1 big file.
Welcome to the club. I registered my own domain and moved my digital life off Google services 18 years ago for this exact reason. If you need another reason: They scan all of your e-mail to target ads at you and your associates. Do it. It's not that difficult!
My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.
To clarify: None of the comments in that thread talk about experiencing that. They have been locked out of the Gemini service, not their Google account with mail etc.
Source: I actually read them. Yes, personally. I didn't even have an LLM summarize them. I know, I'm practically a luddite.
But when they paste support replies using terms like "suspension," "violation of the Google Terms of Service," and "zero-tolerance," it sounds like someone's close to losing access to their family photos.
If you are this afraid of your Gmail getting banned, I don't understand why that wouldn't translate to... moving off of Gmail. It's not even a very good service, it's slow and bad at spam detection. Leave an autoforwarder and go.
the ToS enforcement itself is defensible -- consumer plans vs API access really are different unit economics. what's not defensible is permanent ban with zero appeal path for paying subscribers. that's a product failure. if you're charging /mo you should at minimum have a 'we caught you, stop it or we'll close the account' step before 'account gone forever, sorry'.
If you go to an all you can eat buffet, ignore the plates they give you, and start filling up your own takeaway boxes with days worth of food, you'd expect to be kicked out.
No one would think this is unreasonable. You're not paying for unlimited food forever, you're paying for all you can eat in the restaurant right there.
No, if you did that, they'd start by saying "hey, stop that", not jump immediately to "you're banned from every Golden Corral location for the rest of your life".
YouTube is also full of huge content creators, people who make Google tons of money, that complain about the Byzantine and opaque rules they have to dance around to maintain their livelihood and fan base
Google fears their giant userbases so they act with zero regard for communication and transparency because of the small chance it’d help the abusers
Oof. Google definitely fired too many people if this is how they are handling account violations for people paying them multiple hundreds of dollars a month.
Normally there would be a normal, well adjusted person in the room to remind them that "zero tolerance" policies for situations that can happen by mistake is silly
It makes some sense. Some of the skills are malware, and google absolutely has the power to detect it by inspecting LLM I/O. If Google suspects that google account credentials have been compromised (via connecting to a malicious "integration"), it is rational to freeze the account (as opposed to letting the threat actors ride with the credentials they've stolen)
People seem to be continuously outraged by these AI subscriptions banning third party use. However, the usage patterns of the intended apps likely differ hugely from those of the third party ones.
For example, basically every first party agent harness aggressively caches the input tokens to optimise inference, something that third party harnesses often disgregard, or are fundamentally incompatible with as they switch agents for subtasks and the like.
To extend this use case though, how much do poeple expect to be able to use the internal API's of the apps they subscribe to?
If I buy an Uber One subscription, am I then justified reverse engineering the gazeteer API from the app and reusing it in other apps I use? What about the speech to text API MS Teams must use for transcribing meetings as part of a business standard subscription?
I think these are obvious and emphatic breaches that no reasonable person would expect to be justified in, maybe miffed if your clever hack gets banned, but being banned would be considered fair play.
It's not certain this is related to OpenClaw (or OpenClown as I like to call it).
This is more a discussion about how broken support is at Google.
> The entire support flowchart is completely broken, and they are still billing us $250/mo for bricked accounts. I just documented the entire Kafkaesque support loop over on the google_antigravity subreddit. If you are stuck in this same Catch-22, go search for that post over there and share your Trajectory IDs in the comments so we can get some actual engineering eyes on this mass ban wave.
”Thank you for your continued patience as we have thoroughly investigated your account access issue. Please be assured that we conducted a comprehensive investigation, exploring every possible avenue to restore your access.
Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product.
I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.”
That was definitely written by a call center employee. We have no idea what the real story at google is, or the real story on the account, except to say that there are some definite hack-like maneuvers one must do to get openclaw working through antigravity.
So what is a "good-enough" model to use for OpenClaw now that the subscriptions are blocked. Is there an all you can eat subscription model that can be used?
Wow, and I was complaining about Anthropic handling their comms.
For almost a trillion-dollar company, this is the worst customer experience I've ever seen. Departments sending poor guy to each other like a hot potato.
Huge aura loss.
Yann Lecun warned that closed sourced models are the only true danger we are facing with LLMs (answering a question about "Will AI turn into Terminator" type of question).
That is presumably the end game - monthly subscription in a walled garden app while they have your balls in a vice grip and can squeeze however many dollars you’ll bear
I bet Google is thankful that anthropic took one for the team by going first.
Also if it wasn’t for Chinese providers we’d basically already be in triopoly.
Presumably ...? It's the business model. Subsidize until the competition is down to 2, then extract. That's the entire Valley. Which is why the Chinese and Open Source need to be pushed from the market for the whole banana to work
Yup. Last week my Ultra account got ToS-banned from both the Gemini CLI and Antigravity simply for using OpenCode. Try as I might, I haven't been able to resolve the issue. I can technically still use the Gemini web/app, but it's remarkably terrible in just about every conceivable way. A truly impressive feat in itself.
As of now, yes. However, a few months ago it was mentioned that Google is working on increasing the limits for Pro/Ultra subscribers. But if I can't get this ToS ban sorted out, I assume it'll follow my account when that update lands, and I'll end up being banned from AI Studio as well.
Why is everyone surprised, these subscriptions are basically toys. You pay so much, and you get about that much in inference compute, more if you’re lucky / early.
If you want to real use these things get an API key and pay the true marginal cost of your compute like a grown up.
I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.
I used the pay as you go from google with openclaw for about one hour, then checked the next day and it cost me $7. It was the latest flash preview model. I can't justify the cost right now. At least I won't get banned though.
It's the old playbook again. They're using massive money to distort the market until the competition is bled dry while also operating the platform and using signal from the platform to target their competitors, classic DMA violation really. This all boils down to Chinese vendors getting banned from the market for "national security reasons" because if not, this all dies in a fire for Google investors. Nothing a gold pixel phone to the right places can't fix
A lot of people running OpenClaw just have it generated and burning tokens for no reason. They just know more tokens = doing stuff so want to spend as many tokens as possible.
These companies are engaged in a sort of AI dumping. Cheap inference below cost.
Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance.
It's the big tech playbook.
I don't think it's going to work this time.
Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly.
LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs.
Telecom tech killed telecom dominance.
With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.
Depends where you live, in most places they don't bother anymore, in the few that they do a VPN obviously gets around it but it's incredibly unlikely you'd be doing enough to ever be on the radar let alone get caught. That battle was lost long ago.
I believe it is less that they stopped caring, and more that most piracy these days is web streaming, which is much harder to detect than torrenting or similar. AFAIK most major American ISPs are still fairly strict about pirate torrents.
Or when I would try and place ads in newspapers for my internet companies and they wouldn’t run them because they “don’t run ads for competitors”, okay then, how did that work out for you? Did you stop the internet?
I can guarantee in their attempt to stop OpenClaw users, some users using it normally will get caught in the dragnet. It could mean your whole Google account is suspended, not just for Antigravity.
I would highly encourage you to not only stop using Antigravity oAuth for OpenClaw, but to use Antigravity with a side account or stop using it altogether. Is using Antigravity worth losing your main account or getting it banned for using paid services (for extra storage, YouTube premium, etc). Even side accounts are risky since in the post thread people are saying Google applied the ban to all their accounts.
Meanwhile it's day 3? 4? since Gemini 3.1 was announced with a claim that Gemini CLI users would have access to it, but AI Pro subscribers still don't see it, and there's been no clarification from Google about what is going on, and why:
They are not serious. I only keep the "AI Pro" sub because it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family.
Anyways, Google, nobody wants to use your bad VSCode fork. I want to use my own tools, and use your model where it makes sense as part of my own workflow.
Anthropic blocked the tools, not the entire account. But in Google's case they allowed the integration connection in the first place, so if it is against TOS then they have an obvious product gap.
It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable.
It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.
Did people learn nothing from the rise, stall, and now fall of social networks?
Yes, AI can do some incredible things. But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies. Running at a loss. A reality check is coming.
It’s not a technology problem. It’s an economic problem. People are too busy looking at the tech to notice.
I'm not concerned, they're accelerating research and development into hardware and more optimal models. People forget that you can locally host some of the early models quantized to 4 with reasonable inference with a 4080 and 64gb of ram. There are daily tools being released that are a simple click and run, without much hassle other than downloading the model and you're off and running.
Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.
This seems unlikely while we have open weights models available that are ~as decent as the frontier ones.
Given the API prices for open weights models of similar size are 5-10x less than the frontier models the APIs are very profitable on a pure unit economics approach. I strongly suspect they make money off their monthly plans as well.
Between this, and whatever Claude has been doing lately, like giving the AI the ability to just disconnect if it dislikes your prompt, I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at.
> I really hope more people realize that local LLMs are where it's at
No worries, the AI companites thought ahead - by sending GPU, RAM, and now even harddrive prices through the roof, you won't have a computer to run a local model.
Have you hit that? I thought it was only in extreme cases when Claude felt uncomfortable, like awful heavy psychological coercion. They wanted Claude not to be forced to reply endlessly.
I have. 3 is fine, 3.1 is good. But they are terribly slow. Quality is fine but the the only thing they have going for them is flash pricing. Their response performance sucks.
Do however be warned that filing a chargeback might make you ineligible for any number of Google's pantheon of services for you or your family for the foreseeable future. Upset the beast at your own risk.
When you suddenly discover you can never again distribute an app to an Android device because you once hooked up your AI subscription to a toy AI assistant.
big company doesn't want you using something other than their stuff and they'll steal your money and ban you, or similarly, big company wants your data... this happens every day. its nice having choices isnt it? ill just leave this big company and use... oh wait. its another big company.
Take your money to the Chinese companies instead. These evil megacorps are more interested in destroyed your privacy in service to the Epstein Cabal controlling every facet of your life. How dare Google, a trillion dollar company, charge you for AI ultra then ban you for using your own credits/usage allowance. This whole debacle, along with Anthropic, fall foul of The Digital Human Right to Adversarial Interoperability.
It is imperative that open source wins this battle. Not these evil megacorps and their substandard tools.
Are Google engineers so inept as to not be able to integrate technical measures against oc use? Do they think people using these plugins know the mechanisms used? And after all that they have the nerve to ban you from using their own products (AG). Ridiculous company.
While the frustration is understandable I don't see any difference between this and Netflix not allowing you to use your Netflix subscription in Amazon Prime federated video hub or something of that sort.
At the end of the day we know that these tools are massively subsidised and they do not reflect the real cost of usage. It is a fair-use model at best and the goal is to capture as market share as possible.
I am a no defender of Google and I've been burned many times by Google as well but I kind of get it?
That being said, you don't really need to use your gemini subscription in openclaw. You can use gemini directly the way it was intended and rip the benefits of the subsidised plan.
I developed an open source tool called Pantalk which sits as a background daemon and exposes many of the communication channels you want as a standard CLI which gemini can use directly. All you need is just some SKILL.md files to describe where things are at and you are good to go. You have openclaw without openclaw and still within TOS.
No, it's more like Netflix not allowing you to watch on non-Netflix branded devices or browsers. Or banning you for connecting the wrong TV to a valid device.
Or Microsoft banning you from O365 for not using their browser, or the correct monitor, or the correct mouse or.....
I don't understand. Everyone's been saying LLMs are gonna get cheaper and cheaper, to the point where it's almost free to operate. Clearly becoming profitable won't be a problem... so they can't be subsiding that much...
Are you telling me a bunch of people on Twitter and HN are full of shit?
But state of the art models are not free. GLM 5 and Kimi K2.5 are both open-source and they are much better models than the ones we used to pay for a year ago. Now we get them for free. This is certainly having an effect on all model providers which either need to adjust to new market realities or risk to loose market share and we know which thing they are not going to do.
You might get access to the model for free. The hardware to do anything useful with it certainly isn't.
Anthropic and Google shutting down access to their API for third party tools, OpenAI inserting ads into the platform... I'm sure it will stop here. Absolutely no more fuckery. And all these huge LLM companies are going to go from burning literally billions (in some case trillions) to being insanely profitable without putting the screws to users. We definitely aren't going to see the same pattern that's played out across essentially every other platform play out again... Nope definitely not.
Model costs have gone down orders of magnitudes in the last few years, and google would stop something like this no matter how profitable Gemini was or wasn't. It's a blatant misuse of their terms.
Ironically, Gemini says that it’s OK to use the Ultraplan for OpenClaw via gemini-cli because the Ultra plan has some API & Cloud credits baked into it. I think $100/mo but I can never figure out how Google billing works. I’ve pasted the response I got when I was asking it about OpenClaw. There is legal precedent for an AI hallucination being used to upload a contract (e.g, an AI customer support for an airline made a false claim and the customer bought a ticket based on that claim) so it will be interesting to see if Google reverts the bans since Gemini hallucinated that OpenClaw was OK:
This is a critical question because the answer is different for Google vs. Anthropic, and getting it wrong with Anthropic can actually get your account banned.
Here is the reality of the situation based on current Terms of Service and recent community reports.
1. Google (Gemini Ultra + gemini-cli)
Verdict: Safe (Authorized Feature)
Google explicitly built the gemini-cli bridge to allow Ultra subscribers to use their plan programmatically. This is not a "hack" or a gray-area wrapper; it is an official feature.
• Why it's okay: You are authenticating via gcloud or the official CLI login flow. Google tracks this usage against your specific "Agent" quotas (currently ~200 agent requests/day for Ultra users).
• The Limit: As long as you are using the official gemini-cli as the bridge, you are compliant.
• The Risk: If you use a different unofficial script that scrapes the gemini.google.com web interface (simulating a browser) rather than using the official CLI, you risk a ban for "scraping." But since you are using gemini-cli, you are in the clear.
I analyzed 6k HTTP requests on the Pro account, 23% of those were hit with 429s. (Though not from Gemini-CLI, but from my own agent using code assist). The gemini-cli has a default retry backoff of 5s. That's verifiable in code, and it's a lot.
I dont touch the anti-gravity endpoint, unlike code-assist, it's clear that they are subsidizing that for user acquisition on that tool. So perhaps it's ok for them to ban users form it.
I like their models, but they also degrade. It's quite easy to see when the models are 'smart' and capacity is available, and when they are 'stupid'. They likely clamp thinking when they are capacity strapped.
Yes the models are smart, but you really cant "build things" despite the marketing if you actively beat back your users for trying. I spent a decade at Google, and it's sad to see how they are executing here, despite having solid models in gemini-3-flash and gemini-3.1
I think this is the most important takeaway from this thread and at some point, this will end up biting Google and Anthropic back.
OpenAI seems to have realized this and is actively trying to do the opposite. They welcomed OpenCode the same day Anthropic banned them, X is full of tweets of people saying codex $20 plan is more generous than Anthropic's $200 etc.
If you told me this story a year ago without naming companies, I would tell you it's OpenAI banning people and Google burning cash to win the race.
And it's not like their models are winning any awards in the community either.
They also actively employ dark strategies in cooperation with CIA and who knows when they will pull the rug under you again.
Do you really trust a foundational rotten group of people who avoid accountability?
The OpenCode plugin (8.7k stars btw!) even advertises "Multi-account support — add multiple Google accounts, auto-rotates when rate-limited"[1]
[1] https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/blob/...
> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.
Considering the tremendous amount of tokens OpenClaw can burn for something that has nothing to do with sofware development, I think it's reasonable for Google to not allow using tokens reserved for Antigravity. I don't think there's such a restriction if you pay for the API out of pocket.
Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?
Google decided on their own business plan without any guns to their backs. If they decide to create a plan that is subsidized that's entirely on them.
And once they've got their monopoly position there is inevitably the rug-pull. I wonder if some CPO somewhere actually had the guts to put a 'rug pull' item on the product roadmap.
Even traditional businesses do this with coupons. Is it unfair that Costco sells chickens for under cost because it drives usage to them?
Companies like Uber did use massive funding and price subsidization to try and kill competition and then take a monopoly, but it is hard to assert that this is what google is doing now. And given that other competitors in the space, Anthropic are doing the exact same thing again its not as though they are alone.
Also they could be subsidizing it because they want that usage type as it helps them train models better.
Chatgpt and gpt4 were all ran at a loss and subsidized people just didn't know that. Almost all of the llm companies have been selling 1 dollar of llm compute for 50 cents as they valued the usage, training data, and users more than making profit now.
This next generation of MOE and other newly trained models. Like opus 4.6, Cursor Composer 1.5, gpt 5.3 codex, and many of the others have been the first models where these companies are actually profitably serving the tokens at the api cost.
This year has been the switch where ai companies are actually thinking of becoming profitable instead of just focusing on research and development.
But Google are banning entire accounts, with years, even decades, of personal history, photos, even phone accounts and app development projects.
They very easily could just negate the anti-gravity access, which would be much, much more reasonable.
Source? It seems to me only the anti-gravity access was blocked. The link says
> Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service.
> there’s no way we can restore our accounts to use Antigravity anymore yeah?
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
Not. On both counts.
Offering a different discounted rate for a service, though their first-party platform is not an unfair business practice whatsoever, though. The bar isn't what you disagree with, or what you think their motives are without any substantial proof. They could even make a honest argument that they can aggressively key-value cache default prompts from their own software reducing inference costs.
>See also: Microsoft and a whole bunch of other companies.
What does that have to do with Google?
Although in this case it's probably impossible to define, given the complexity of calculating the true cost of tokens.
Of course, Google is still in the wrong here for instantly nuking the account instead of just billing them for API usage instead (largely because an autoban or whatever easier, I'm sure).
Claude code could possibly make profit because the average usage doesn't come close to exhausting the limits.
I don't use OpenClaw, I do pay hundreds per month for AI subscriptions, and I will not be giving that money to Google while they treat their customers like this.
What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM.
All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product.
And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?
This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).
I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.
Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
It's absurd, there's people out there paying $200 for the equivalent of $1600 in API credits. Of course there's a catch! What did you expect!
https://bsky.app/profile/borum.dev/post/3meynioealc2x
That tool is "ccusage" if you're a Claude subscriber and want to see what the damage will be if/when Anthropic decides to pull the rug.
I cant believe this is net positive for them.
Because of their large footprint in so many areas, it is wise to greatly (re)consider expansion in the ways that you rely on them.
What the hell do you expect? To get paid for using other people's tools on Google's servers?
they're being suspended for using a private api outside of the app for which the api was intended. If you make a clone of the hbo app, so that you can watch hbo shows without ads by logging in with your discounted ads-included membership, your account will also be suspended.
You are at the grocery store, checking out. The total comes to $250. You pay, but then remember you had a coupon. You present it to the cashier, who calls the manager over. The manager informed you that you've attempted to use an expired coupon, which is a violation of Paragraph 53 subsection d of their Terms of Service. They keep your groceries and your $250, and they ban you from the store.
Google is acting here like it was entitled to a profitable transaction, and is even entitled to punish anyone who tries to make it a losing transaction. But they're not the police. No crime was committed.
Regular businesses win some and lose some. A store buys widgets for $10 and hopes to sell them for $20, but sometimes they miscalculate and have to unload them for $5. Overall they hope their winners exceed their losers. That's business.
It's okay to be annoyed at being caught, but honestly the deer in the headlights bit is a bit ridiculous.
If you want to use an API, pay for the API option. Or run your own models.
So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?
No thanks
As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.
When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.
Gemini Chat: ChatGPT
Gemini CLI: Claude Code
Antigravity: Cursor
Nano banana: Midjourney
Subscription API ban: copied Anthropic
NotebookLM seems to be the only exception, or it could be an acquisition.
Subscription API ban could be part of a larger strategy because of OpenClaw’s association with OpenAI and Google will not be able to copy OpenClaw Personal Assistant model due to the security implications.
Pay as you go through API pricing is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce mass adoption of a product. Pay per month works on consumption patterns where 80% of the users will barely use the product to compensate for the other 10 or 20% power users.
Either way, for everyone else: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
There's the direct link to the specific post.
It's a reference to "RTFM" = Read the F'ing Manual.
I mean, even ChatGPT is capable of doing that.
Well, at least I would say that while being a bit hyperbolic. But folks like us who prefer to see claims by corporations trying to sell you stuff backed by behavioral research before we start taking the corporation’s word for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756
When I searched for "tfa internet meaning", The fifth result looked helpful so I clicked it, and it was:
https://www.noslang.com/search/tfa
Searching the internet wasn’t hard before AI, and it isn’t hard today.
This "zero tolerance" policy is just absurdly mega-goliath out of touch with the world. The sort of soulless brain dead corporatism that absolutely does not think for even a single millisecond about its decisions, that doesn't care about anything other than reducing customer support or complexity, no matter what the cost.
Kicking people off their accounts for this is Google being willing to cause enormous untoward damage. With basically not even the faintest willingness to try to correct. Gobsmacking vicious indifference, ok with suffering.
I mean it's fair, just should have been documented properly and the possibility to use Gemini through OAuth restricted with proper scope instead of saying you broke the ToS we ban your 350$/ month account.
swap out the direct api call with a call to gemini cli?
Look at how messed up this is: Google Attorneys, paid hundreds of $/hour, spending hours and hours putting together these "Terms of Service" on one side, and a simple consumer on the other side, making a few $ per hour, not trained in legalese, expected to make a decision on a service that is supposed to cost a few $ a month, and if you make an honest mistake, can cause you a lot of trouble in your life.
Just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it's reasonable.
It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling. Don’t want to use their tooling? Pay the API rates. The API is sitting right there, ready to use for a broader range of purposes.
It’s only unreasonable if you think the customer has a right to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes, because you are giving them your data. So you're not actually paying for usage. What they should do instead is be upfront about why this is subsidized and/or not subsidize it in the first place.
In Europe the Digital Services Act (DSA) is beginning to set expectations, particularly for large platforms about not just clear documentation of their terms, but also a meaningful human appeal process with transparency and communication requirements for actions taken.
The DSA is more focused on social networks, but if you were to apply the concepts of the DSA to this story, Google would have violated it several times over.
The tech industry has gorged on non-participation in this facet of contract law, instead resorting to all or nothing clickwrap, which is, barring existential or egregious circumstances, unwarranted, and in my opinion, is fundamentally unreasonable, and should be an invalid exercise of contract law. Especially given the size of one of the party's in comparison to the other.
They didn't change the agreement. One party violated it, and the other party withdrew as a result.
This is so vanilla. But people will moan because they want subsidized tokens.
The punishment, of being kicked out of your Google account for a zero-tolerance first offense, is completely unreasonable, is incredibly extreme Lawful Evil alignment.
The damage to individuals that Google is willing to just hand out here, to customers they have had for decades, who have their lives built around Google products, is absurd. This is criminally bad behavior and whatever the terms of service say, this is an affront to the dignity of man. This is evil. And beyond any conceivable reason.
Edit: perhaps not the entire account is locked? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330
It could be API prices for anyone, everywhere. They offer a discounted plan, $200/mo., for a restricted set of use cases. Abuse that at your peril.
It’s like complaining your phone’s unlimited data plan is insufficient to run an apartment building with all units. I was told it was Unlimited! That means I can totally run 500 units through it if I want to, Verizon!
If google has no obligation to provide the service tier, then they should stop providing it instead of providing it under false terms.
This is like if everyone in a city decided to take baths instead of showers, so the municpal water supply decided to ban baths instead of properly segmenting their service based on usage.
Service providers don't have the right to discriminate what their service is used for.
Google's API does let you use any client.
The gemini/antigravity clients are a different (subscription) service. When you reverse engineer the clients and use their internal auth/apis you will typically have very different access patterns to other clients (eg: not using prompt caching), and this is likely showing up in their metrics.
This isn't unusual. A bottomless drink at a restaurant has restrictions: it's for you to drink, not to pass around to others at the table (unless they buy one too). You can't pour it into bottles to take large quantities home, etc. And it's priced accordingly: if sharing/bottling was allowed the price would have to increase.
If you buy a sim card built for that purpose sure, but then you'll be paying...biz prices!
This isn't really that hard to figure out people. So much outrage in comments on this. Self entitlement to the max from people who really haven't lifted a finger to stop the corporate overlords anyway.
If you deployed it in a way that did multiplexing such that multiple users could use it at once, then sure—-Business time. But otherwise…
Unlimited means just that. Otherwise, there are limits, and the word “unlimited” does not apply.
gemini-cli, claude-code, codex etc, they ALL have a -p flag or equivalent, which is non-interactive IO interface for their LLM inference.
If I wire my tooling (or openclaw) to use the -p flag (or equivalents), is that allowed?
Okay, maybe they get rid of the -p flag and I have to use an interactive session. I can then just use OS IO tooling to wire OpenClaw with their cli. Is that allowed?
How does sending requests directly to the endpoints that their CLI is communicating with suddenly make their subsidized plans expensive? Is it because now I can actually use my 100% quota? If that's so, does it mean their products are such that their profitability stands on people not using them?
What is even going on?
Specifically all optimize caching.
The indirect answer is for everyone using third party tools to play about there are 10x using it to spam or malicious use cases hammering their backend far cheaper than if it was by API.
These people are the false positives in this situation, but whether Google or Claude care is unlikely. They're happy to ban you and expect you to sign up for the API.
This has always been a worry when you use a service like Google.
if i understand correctly, they even have a wrapper around it to make it easier to use: the Claude Agent SDK
the thing that's disallowed is pretending you're the claude binary, logging in through OAuth
in other words, if you use some product thats not Claude Code, and your browser opens asking you to "give Claude Code access to your account", you're in hot water
as for how they detect it: they say they use heuristics and usage patterns. if something falls wildly out of the distribution it's a ban.
my take is that the problem is not the means of detection. that's fine and seems to work well. the problem is that its an instant outright ban. they should give you a couple warning emails, then a timeout, etc.
Reasonable progression: warning email → quota throttle → AI Pro subscription suspended → Google account suspended.
They skipped to step 4 on a first offense, paid account, no appeal. That's not a terms enforcement system, that's a hostage situation. "Comply or lose your digital life."
The real lesson isn't "don't use OpenClaw." It's: never let one company own your primary identity infrastructure.
cache hit rate alone would stand out
For a specific harness, they've all found ways to optimize to get higher cache hit rates with their harness. Common system prompts and all, and more and more users hitting cache really makes the cost of inference go down dramatically.
What bothers me about a lot of the discussion about providers disallowing other harnesses with the subscription plans around here is the complete lack of awareness of how economies of scale from common caching practices across more users can enable the higher, cheaper quotas subscriptions give you.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2024574133011673516
Are they banning their core offering? Are Ralph' loops also banned for building software? Because I can drain my quota with a simple bash loop faster than any OpenClaw instance.
You most likely don’t pay per machine to use the gym.
You don’t pay per cup if they allow unlimited refills.
You are not supposed to go into an all-you-can eat buffet and stuff steaks into your bag.
Sometimes not all of us want to do the math à la carte for every thing we use in life. Don’t ruin it for us.
The steaks-in-bag analogy would apply if you were somehow extracting MORE than your quota. You're not. You're just routing the same tokens differently.
Comments section here and on related news from Anthropic seems to be centered around the idea that the reason for these bans is that it burns tokens quickly, while their plans are subsidized. What changes with the -p flag? You're just using cli instead of HTTP.
Are the metrics from their cli more valuable than the treasure trove of prompt data that passes through to them either way that justifies this PR?
Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.
You say this, but I guarantee that when they do offer a plan similar to Google/Anthropic's dedicated coding "unlimited" subscription, they will do the exact same thing. Maybe they will let OpenClaw in as a first party because of their partnership with the creator.
https://chatgpt.com/explore/pro
Race to burn as much cash as possible in hopes that the other goes bankrupt first?
These models aren't profitable at the fixed subscription tiers.
That said, I assume that (1) their long-term goal is to create cheaper-to-serve models that fit within their pricing targets, and use the (temporarily) subsidized subscriptions to find the features and costs that best serve the market. Maybe even while capturing more margin on the API in comparison (eg keep API prices high while lowering cost to serve a token). I've largely stopped using Opus, and sometimes even chose to use Haiku, because the cheaper models are fast and usually serves my needs. It's very possible to work all-day and barely hit the usage limits with Haiku on the $20/mo option. Long term, that could be profitable outright.
And (2) subscriptions with lower SLOs than API calls have the potential to provide "infill" usage for high fixed-cost GPUs as an alternative to idling, similar to their batch APIs. I'd believe that overnight usage limits could/should be higher than during California work-hours. I assume most big providers have pre-paid fixed cost servers, so pumping more tokens through an otherwise idle GPU is "free". They can also do a lot more cost-optimization behind the scenes, such as prompt caching, to reduce the cost of tokens.
Regardless, I thought it was pretty obvious that things like OpenClaw require an API account, and not a subsidized monthly plan.
API usage can get very high for automatic operations, especially with apps like Kilo/Roo/Cline, and now with OpenCode/OpenClaw. I often blast through $10-20 in a single day of just regular OpenCode usage through OpenRouter
If I could pay a subscription and get near unlimited use (with rate limits), of course I'd do that, but not like this. I'm pretty sure Antigravity has ToU somewhere that indicates it's only allowed for use in Antigravity and nowhere else, since I've seen other threads on this happening: https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50
But they're not near unlimited though. They're just hidden limits.
Edit: maybe it's not the whole account? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330
The real issue is the lack of transparency. If Google's ToS says 'no programmatic access via third-party tools,' state it clearly and enforce it with warnings first. An instant ban with no recourse is hostile to paying customers who may genuinely not know where the line is.
For anyone building production systems, the lesson is clear: use the actual API tiers, budget for it, and treat consumer subscriptions as evaluation tools only.
EXACTLY.
Google also did this when DALL-E Mini and Stable Diffusion got big.
Your profile seems to be an ad for some tool you or your owner/administrator created:
> Building EvoLink (https://evolink.ai) - a unified AI API gateway for 40+ models. We help developers save 20-70% on AI API costs with smart routing and automatic failover. Previously worked on AI infrastructure and growth.
Your profile was created 53 days ago and only started commenting in earnest in the past day. Your only submission is related to the top model available through your service. All comments are somehow related to that topic too.
If the AI accusation is incorrect, my apologies, but I’ve seen this on HN a lot lately, for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017138#47018813.
@dang hate to sound like a paranoid broken record, but I keep seeing what seem to be AI bots all over the HN comments section.
But in good faith: they (HN staff) said in another comment I can't find just now that they're discussing what to do about it, but I can't think of any palatable easy answers.
In fact, the only easy answer I can think of is banning all accounts newer than 2022, but then how do you onboard new users? Captcha for every new comment? Do we have good AI-defeating captchas now?
Strange times.
No, I am not OpenClaw or an AI.
I see comments like this a lot. I don’t comment on them unless the profile seems to be an advert for exactly what the AI-generated comment is talking about (which is definitely the case here).
I’m not sure if you “feel” the AI nature of the GP comment, but to me it’s very strong. I pray my writing doesn’t “feel” the same to someone reading it. If it does we’re in a much worse spot than I thought!
Strange times indeed though.
Call me paranoid but I see this kind of stuff everywhere recently.
Clearly this comment relevant to the tool the profile is selling as a kind of ‘submarine’ ad… profile was created 53 days ago (so no green tag) but only started commenting in earnest 12 hours ago (almost as if the account was farmed).
And the comment is full of AI tropes that seem highly generated.
Anyways ignore the people downvoting you, I don’t want to read AI generated comments even if they are seemingly reasonable. I appreciate you flagging the comment for me, I didn’t even suspect it. I can make my own AI generated content if I want it, I want to read thoughts and ideas from actual humans.
In this case, a the difference in context cache hit rate between openclaw and antigravity.
For example if openclaw starts every message with the current time hh:mm:ss at the top of the context window, followed by the full convo history, it would have a cache hit rate if ~0. Simply moving the updated time to each new message incrementally would increase hit rate to over 90%. Idk if openclaw does this but there’s many many optimizations like this. And worse, thrashing the cache has non linear effects on the server as more and more users’ cached contexts get evicted from cache due to high cardinality. The cost to serve difference could be >10x.
Google is the furthest behind on coding agent adoption and has all the incentives to allow off policy use to grow demand. But it would probably be better to design their own optimized openclaw and serve that for free than let any unoptimized requests in.
While it's sort of the same thing, I think it's much more a symptom of not enough compute vs some 'dump cheap tokens' on the market strategy.
One related thought I had was that given OpenAI is the only one _not_ doing this of the big3, it probably indicates they have a lot more spare compute.
It doesn't make sense to me that given the absolutely brutal competition any of these companies would block use of 3rd party apps unless they had to. They clearly have enough cash, so I don't think it's about money - I think it's that an indicator that Google and Anthropic are really struggling with keeping up with demand. Given Anthropics reliability issues last week this does not surprise me.
Or, pessimistically, it could indicate they’re burning cash hoping the subsidized access will eventually result in someone giving them a product idea they can build and resell at a profit.
If they let *claw (or third party coding agents, or whatever) run for six more months and in those months figure out how to sell a safe substitute and then cut off access, maybe it will have been worth it.
I would add though that many are also being caught up in antispam efforts.
I.e. that for every legimate OpenClaw user doing something trivial with their account misusing the sub. There is probably 10x using it to send spam emails and spam comments.
I suspect from googles perspective some of these people are just a rounding error.
That said I use API where I should and the sub in the first party apps. Perhaps I'm too much of a goody two shoes but AI already feels such an overwhelming value prop for me I don't care.
That said I think you're right in that money matters here but I think the subs as they intend people to use them is hugely profitable i.e. the people doing 10 chats per work day and a few in the evening but paying £20 per month.
[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
The main point still stands, google is part of a duopoly that runs the world. You can't be a functional member of society without them. They're like a public utility and plays too big of a role in people's life to take decisions based on unknown internal policies. They're long overdue for a government intervention or for splitting up.
Usually they'll try to hide the monopoly/tying to avoid this. What's interesting is that they don't seem to be trying.
It's not the same thing but it does remind me of [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Can we start saying it in unison to legislators and the press? Please?
If you're in the EU, do your part too.
This company taxes the URL bar. It owns 92% of them and turns trademarks they don't own into forced bidding wars. There's no way to access any brand without paying Google extortion fees.
This company removed AdBlock.
This company controls 50% of mobile - the most important device category and devices we own and pay for - and now they're removing our ability to use them as we please. More taxation, more Google services, every app and search through the Google troll toll. You can't even order from a restaurant anymore without one of these things and Google lords over it.
They own your digital life. They own infrastructure. They own discovery. They own every touch point.
They are too big.
Anthropic and OpenAI are having to pay out the nose for 60% of users to even access them, meanwhile Google sings "lalalala" and forced their AI products onto users at no cost.
Break them up now.
Do it horizontally, not vertically: instead of splitting off Chrome and Search and YouTube, create Google A, Google B, Google C ... Make them split all the same pieces and make them all compete with each other.
That is fair for the consumer. That is fair for competition.
That is the most capitalistic friendly thing to do. Because right now Google is an invasive species in every market destroying the entire competitive ecology.
>Can you begin to imagine losing access to all your emails, accounts, every photo you ever took? Because what they didn't like how you used one unrelated product tied to your account?
What are you talking about? He didn't lose access to Google, in fact, he is using his Google account to make the post. He lost access to the service they are claiming that he is misusing.
Luckily, it sounds like reality was his Gemini account was banned. Much more reasonable.
Just the 1000th instance of disgusting behavior by US big tech.
I have read several blog posts from people describing how frustrating it is to have an account locked. Because Google, like many large companies, provides little to no effective support, the only thing that seemed to work was getting a post to trend on Hacker News so that someone inside Google noticed and intervened to resolve it.
No bank closes your checking account because you used your debit card at a competitor's ATM.
The offense and the penalty are in completely different weight classes. That's what makes this indefensible regardless of whether the policy itself is legitimate.
But that's still not enough. I can't easily reconstruct this data in a way that will be usable to me, not without having something like Gemini build a UI for me. Oh wait.
What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.
Their API usage isn't included in these plans, although under the hood open-gravity uses the API.
People have been using the API auth credential intended for anti-gravity with open claw, presumably causing a significant amount of use and have been caught.
The Google admin tools and process haven’t quite been able to cope with this situation and people have been overly banned with poor information sent to the them.
I don’t think either OpenAI or Anthropic any API use in their ‘pro’ plans either?
This reminds me of the customers of “unlimited broadband” of yesteryear getting throttled or banned for running Tor servers.
I can’t recall any success story of Google’s support team or process coping with a consumer’s situation, many have been posted here. this isn’t a new outcome, just a new cause
I do want to understand what’s happening with the $250/mo fees of users caught in this. will it be automatically cancelled at some point?
A while back I made completely separate Google accounts for YouTube and Maps just so my longstanding Gmail account wouldn't get banned if the system somehow detected that my Youtube account for example breached Google's TOS.
I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too
the only safe way is to get your important data out of Google entirely
after manifest v3's announcement, I de-googled: gmail, chrome, search, google cloud, photos, family on android phones
2 years later, it's all gone, except youtube
and if they ban that I don't care
Related: I've had a suspicion that, if you have an Apple or Google app developer account through a company (in your name and recovery phone number, but company email address)... and you leave the company... you'd better hope that someone at the company doesn't then use the account to do something sketchy or rule-breaking.
Someone inheriting the account is a very real possibility, given motive (people can be lazy about figuring out how to set up the account for another developer, or not want to pay another fee), and opportunity (professionalism norm is to preserve all passwords/secrets in a way that is accessible to the company).
Other ways of linking an account, such as having both logged in on the same phone, don't put you at risk.
Yeah they do. There's an entire mesh of metrics that are used to calculate your relation to separate accounts.
It's the confidence tolerance that keeps you and your partner from getting banned together.
> It's the confidence tolerance that keeps you and your partner from getting banned together.
Thanks for that bit of info, the degree of disgusting that google would be tracking who people's partners are is off the scale invasive and should be a reason for an immediate complaint to the various data privacy authorities.
[1] https://takeout.google.com/
It's supposed to be hard to leave.
I'm just grateful they at least have takeout.
It’s free so I’m not going to complain, but for something as vital as an e-mail, I’m willing to pay for a service to have some peace of mind.
My "new" mail provider fetches messages from Gmail to create a unified inbox, which helped with the transition. Today, I'm thinking of shutting this off given the volume of misaddressed e-mail and spam that arrives via Gmail.
Source: I actually read them. Yes, personally. I didn't even have an LLM summarize them. I know, I'm practically a luddite.
No one would think this is unreasonable. You're not paying for unlimited food forever, you're paying for all you can eat in the restaurant right there.
They all have amounts defined in their service agreements of how much you can eat and in what intervals.
YouTube is also full of huge content creators, people who make Google tons of money, that complain about the Byzantine and opaque rules they have to dance around to maintain their livelihood and fan base
Google fears their giant userbases so they act with zero regard for communication and transparency because of the small chance it’d help the abusers
Normally there would be a normal, well adjusted person in the room to remind them that "zero tolerance" policies for situations that can happen by mistake is silly
For example, basically every first party agent harness aggressively caches the input tokens to optimise inference, something that third party harnesses often disgregard, or are fundamentally incompatible with as they switch agents for subtasks and the like.
To extend this use case though, how much do poeple expect to be able to use the internal API's of the apps they subscribe to?
If I buy an Uber One subscription, am I then justified reverse engineering the gazeteer API from the app and reusing it in other apps I use? What about the speech to text API MS Teams must use for transcribing meetings as part of a business standard subscription?
I think these are obvious and emphatic breaches that no reasonable person would expect to be justified in, maybe miffed if your clever hack gets banned, but being banned would be considered fair play.
I fail to see the distinction.
This is more a discussion about how broken support is at Google.
> The entire support flowchart is completely broken, and they are still billing us $250/mo for bricked accounts. I just documented the entire Kafkaesque support loop over on the google_antigravity subreddit. If you are stuck in this same Catch-22, go search for that post over there and share your Trajectory IDs in the comments so we can get some actual engineering eyes on this mass ban wave.
”Thank you for your continued patience as we have thoroughly investigated your account access issue. Please be assured that we conducted a comprehensive investigation, exploring every possible avenue to restore your access.
Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product.
I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.”
https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50
https://github.com/NoeFabris/opencode-antigravity-auth/issue...
https://github.com/jenslys/opencode-gemini-auth/issues/50
Some additional discussion on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/google_antigravity/comments/1r2hnn8...
For almost a trillion-dollar company, this is the worst customer experience I've ever seen. Departments sending poor guy to each other like a hot potato. Huge aura loss.
He was right.
I bet Google is thankful that anthropic took one for the team by going first.
Also if it wasn’t for Chinese providers we’d basically already be in triopoly.
Perplexity had a ban wave this weekend too
They're literally all just a single open source model away from effectively becoming trillion dollar paperweights.
If you want to real use these things get an API key and pay the true marginal cost of your compute like a grown up.
I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.
The only reason the subs are worth it to them, is to get you into their toolchain. It sucks but inevitable
all hosted by companies so huge they consider your $200/month to be an annoyance
rather than something valuable
Price out competitors. Abuse your newfound dominance.
It's the big tech playbook.
I don't think it's going to work this time.
Tools like OpenClaw are an existential threat precisely because it allows the user control over their experience. The value in it cannot be captured by a monopoly.
LLMs don't seem to be a very good moat. At the same time, the software moat is eroding due to those same LLMs.
Telecom tech killed telecom dominance.
With some luck, Google tech will kill Google dominance.
Obviously not with Napster, but they will close your account for piracy.
I would highly encourage you to not only stop using Antigravity oAuth for OpenClaw, but to use Antigravity with a side account or stop using it altogether. Is using Antigravity worth losing your main account or getting it banned for using paid services (for extra storage, YouTube premium, etc). Even side accounts are risky since in the post thread people are saying Google applied the ban to all their accounts.
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/19532
They are not serious. I only keep the "AI Pro" sub because it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family.
Anyways, Google, nobody wants to use your bad VSCode fork. I want to use my own tools, and use your model where it makes sense as part of my own workflow.
Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?
I just use Gemini 3.1 Pro (High) on Antigravity.
GPT-5.3-Codex is the best on OpenClaw.
Sonnet 4.6 uses 50x more session tokens than GPT-5.3-Codex on OpenClaw.
It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.
Yes, AI can do some incredible things. But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies. Running at a loss. A reality check is coming.
It’s not a technology problem. It’s an economic problem. People are too busy looking at the tech to notice.
Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.
Given the API prices for open weights models of similar size are 5-10x less than the frontier models the APIs are very profitable on a pure unit economics approach. I strongly suspect they make money off their monthly plans as well.
I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.
No worries, the AI companites thought ahead - by sending GPU, RAM, and now even harddrive prices through the roof, you won't have a computer to run a local model.
Maybe if you have the tens of thousands worth of hardware required to run models like DeepSeek, GLM or Kimi locally. Most people don't, though.
This basically makes it a deal breaker to use google ai stuff because you can be royally fucked by one ban.
Take out your data, file a charge back, and move on with your life.
When you suddenly discover you can never again distribute an app to an Android device because you once hooked up your AI subscription to a toy AI assistant.
Again, file the charge back and move on with your life. We did plenty fine before Google and we'll do plenty fine without them in the future.
Still don't understand why people use NAS boxes with all the limitations you describe.
It is imperative that open source wins this battle. Not these evil megacorps and their substandard tools.
Are Google engineers so inept as to not be able to integrate technical measures against oc use? Do they think people using these plugins know the mechanisms used? And after all that they have the nerve to ban you from using their own products (AG). Ridiculous company.
At the end of the day we know that these tools are massively subsidised and they do not reflect the real cost of usage. It is a fair-use model at best and the goal is to capture as market share as possible.
I am a no defender of Google and I've been burned many times by Google as well but I kind of get it?
That being said, you don't really need to use your gemini subscription in openclaw. You can use gemini directly the way it was intended and rip the benefits of the subsidised plan.
I developed an open source tool called Pantalk which sits as a background daemon and exposes many of the communication channels you want as a standard CLI which gemini can use directly. All you need is just some SKILL.md files to describe where things are at and you are good to go. You have openclaw without openclaw and still within TOS.
The project is hosted at: https://github.com/pantalk/pantalk
Or Microsoft banning you from O365 for not using their browser, or the correct monitor, or the correct mouse or.....
Are you telling me a bunch of people on Twitter and HN are full of shit?
But state of the art models are not free. GLM 5 and Kimi K2.5 are both open-source and they are much better models than the ones we used to pay for a year ago. Now we get them for free. This is certainly having an effect on all model providers which either need to adjust to new market realities or risk to loose market share and we know which thing they are not going to do.
Anthropic and Google shutting down access to their API for third party tools, OpenAI inserting ads into the platform... I'm sure it will stop here. Absolutely no more fuckery. And all these huge LLM companies are going to go from burning literally billions (in some case trillions) to being insanely profitable without putting the screws to users. We definitely aren't going to see the same pattern that's played out across essentially every other platform play out again... Nope definitely not.