OpenClaw Claude CLI Policy Dispute: Steinberger's Misreading of Anthropic's Statement, Not Policy Change

Gate News message, April 22 — Anthropic has not relaxed its policy on Claude CLI usage for third-party tools like OpenClaw, according to a clarification by the platform. The apparent policy shift was actually a misinterpretation by OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger of a statement made by Claude Code lead Boris Cherny on April 6.

Borry's original response addressed a specific issue: Steinberger had tested the official Claude CLI with the -p parameter and a system prompt mentioning "running inside OpenClaw," which triggered Anthropic's classifier to flag it as third-party usage and deduct from Extra Usage. Boris acknowledged the classifier's overreaction and promised to improve the -p parameter's usage guidelines. However, his statement targeted preventing false positives for individual developers, not granting OpenClaw an exemption. Steinberger misinterpreted this as blanket approval, and in version 2026.4.7, he restored Claude CLI as the default backend for new users, claiming in OpenClaw's documentation that "Claude -p reuse is now permitted."

Anthropic's server-side classifier rejected OpenClaw requests twice, identifying it as third-party usage based on its system prompt fingerprint. Since OpenClaw initiates the actual requests, Anthropic continues to charge third-party rates despite using the official CLI underneath. Steinberger later acknowledged the contradiction: theoretically permitted, but practically denied. The disagreement stemmed from imprecise language—Boris aimed to refine the classifier's boundaries to prevent developer misclassification, while Steinberger interpreted this as extending coverage to OpenClaw itself.