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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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).
> 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.
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.
>Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?
Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook/Meta - all eagerly colluded with an unconstitutional and illegal mass surveillance program to violate the privacy of their entire user base, starting almost 20 years ago, revealed 13 years ago.
Facebook was conducing experiments to psychologically abuse users to artificially boost platform engagement. This was widely reported on over a decade ago.
All of these companies are proud partners of the US intelligence community, and have helped develop software used to murder innocent civilians, aid ICE and DHS, and several even openly cooperate with the US DoD.
Were these the same people you were expecting to treat you, the user, fairly and judiciously?
They're deceptive, manipulative predators, and they have been publicly known as such since Obama was just starting his second term. The best time to stop trusting them was over a decade ago. The second best time to stop trusting them is now.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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?
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 to not be forced to reply endlessly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
> 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.
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).
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.
Claude code could possibly make profit because the average usage doesn't come close to exhausting the limits.
Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook/Meta - all eagerly colluded with an unconstitutional and illegal mass surveillance program to violate the privacy of their entire user base, starting almost 20 years ago, revealed 13 years ago.
Facebook was conducing experiments to psychologically abuse users to artificially boost platform engagement. This was widely reported on over a decade ago.
All of these companies are proud partners of the US intelligence community, and have helped develop software used to murder innocent civilians, aid ICE and DHS, and several even openly cooperate with the US DoD.
Were these the same people you were expecting to treat you, the user, fairly and judiciously?
They're deceptive, manipulative predators, and they have been publicly known as such since Obama was just starting his second term. The best time to stop trusting them was over a decade ago. The second best time to stop trusting them is now.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.
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.
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.
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.
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
Edit: maybe it's not the whole account? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330
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.
What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.
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
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.
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.
Source: I actually read them. Yes, personally. I didn't even have an LLM summarize them. I know, I'm practically a luddite.
[1] https://takeout.google.com/
It's supposed to be hard to leave.
I'm just grateful they at least have takeout.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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
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.”
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.
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.
all hosted by companies so huge they consider your $200/month to be an annoyance
rather than something valuable
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.
The only reason the subs are worth it to them, is to get you into their toolchain. It sucks but inevitable
I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.
Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?
Obviously not with Napster, but they will close your account for piracy.
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.
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.
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.