I doubt they actually want to do this.
They clearly see having a wide set of paying customers as valuable (otherwise they'd just raise prices) but if you are stuck having to make hard choice then I can see the attraction of this approach.
And where’s the difference between the Claude Desktop app and OpenClaw at this point? Anthropic have been hard at work porting the most important features. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot with both now.
OpenClaw and OpenCode are open source projects with zero warranty and nobody to sue if they have a npm Trojan in them
When has any technology company been sued for pushing accidental malware in their updates?
The reality is that you have never had anyone to sue.
The risk with OpenClaw et al isn't that the software itself is compromised. The risk is that what it does is fundamentally insecure and Claude Code isn't any better
Once again, despite everyone's protestations about not anthropomorphising things, LLMs are, to first approximation, best seen as little people on a chip. So with that in mind, it should be obvious why enterprise would prefer dealing with Anthropic's official products than OpenClaw - it's similar to contracting a team of software engineers from another well-known corporation and giving them keys to the castle, vs. inviting in any randos that show up at the door on any given day and can pass FizzBuzz test. Even if, in both cases, these turned out to be the same people, having an organizational/legal-level relationship changes the expectations and trust levels involved.
Anthropic wants you to use their subscription only for Anthropic products.
I don’t think the difference is that difficult to see.
I think that's part of it, the other part is that OpenClaw is OpenAI IP now, and Anthropic want to allow users to ensloppify the internet through their own features now instead.
It's pretty clear that they do continually adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription, per se (and at best they offer sort-of estimates of quotas). The same activity exhausts my session quota on one day, yet it's a minor contributor on another. They make this very explicit with the "2x" event for the past two weeks, but anyone who uses it knows this is basically an ongoing reality: If you stick to using it off hours, you generally enjoy a more liberal usage grant.
But if they just "adjust the amount of tokens in a subscription", they would be punishing everyone for the outliers. The average normal user has spurts of usage where occasionally they need more and then there are gaps where they use little.
Subscription services rely upon this behaviour, and the economics only work if they "oversell". That's why OpenClaw users want to sneak in under a subscription, because the tokens come at a discounted rate over using the API based upon that assumption, but they are breaking the model because those users aren't conforming to expectations. It's basically the tragedy of the commons and a small number of users want to piss in the well.