Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw(discuss.ai.google.dev) |
Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw(discuss.ai.google.dev) |
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.
Oh, maybe not, they did it in the name of "terms of service abuse" and "risk assessment".
Thus it would be far better if we can just have SOTA open weight model to run OpenClaw/Clawdbot/Molt at least we are under control. And as you see the two Chinese models I mentioned are indeed open weight, albeit taking atrocious amount of resource to really self host, and you probably need to have abliterations to remove their political guardrails.
Sigh. We can't have great things with those big tech corpos and CCP politics. Big question: Why has this world gone to shit lately.
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.
Effectively.
This basically makes it a deal breaker to use google ai stuff because you can be royally fucked by one ban.
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.
Are they betting on their software, not their LLM deciding if they survive or not if competitive open source model is dropped? Oh boy, the market is going to have some fun times when realization hits.
TIL it's "unfair" to sell a product for a particular purpose and offer subsidised rates to build a customer base. Different planet.
These companies keep telling you that you own nothing, they change their TOS without informing you, they collect everything they can from you and yet, you spend $249/mo for their service.
I mean......
You really think Google wants to subsidize compute so that you can organize your freaking calendar you morons? Sounds like a great use of a data center where you could just click accept invite. Oh, you can't reply to text messages, so you trust AI to do it now. Wow! You must be the laziest piece of s** on the planet. Oh email's too much for you? Let me tell you what inbox zero as a mandatory process looks like when you wake up with 150 emails on average every single day over a a 7-year period and you handle every single one every single day before you leave the office with zero unread and zero pending reply. You get really good at making sure every single customer is handled. When customer service is not optional and your service level agreement is that you answer customers 24/7 365 you do it immediately without question and everything is solved before the lights are turned off and if something goes wrong at any time of the day that phone's getting picked up ring one and the problem is being solved before the line is hung up or there's an escalation to management and it is handled on the spot. Some of you are a little soft and don't actually believe in putting in the work or putting yourself in positions that will leave you slightly inconvenienced because it would be way too much to ask for you to stay 3 hours after work if that's what it takes to build a billion dollar company. I really hope you enjoy dinner with your family every single night at 4:59 p.m. Sharp while you get smoked by people that are actually staying at the office. So now that the only two options you think you have are paying someone for their large language model because you are poorly researched and don't know how to build your own system taking thousands of dollars and buying something with over a terabyte of RAM that spits out a hundred tokens a second. Maybe you can do that 10 times to get a thousand tokens a second if you really want to drop 100 Grand on new macbooks. That's about a quarter of the speed of meta which offers infinite free compute if you cleared their wait list as a developer(6+ month waitlist for consideration).If you don't have free compute from meta, I feel bad for you because they were giving 3,000 requests per minute until openclaw came out and that's only 10 requests per a minute because they got real tired real quick of these 24/7 agents taken up all the compute to do. Jack diddly s** I will tell you that. Claude grok meta Google and almost any frontier model you haven't heard of will give you infinite free compute if you are building products that have never been seen before. I'm not sure what Peter was doing spending 20,000 a month on compute. Does anyone have a figure on how many credits he burned? Cuz I'm in the tens of billions and my compute spend is $0 over 18 months. It's really interesting what happens to your account when you feed it, new data, new solutions and try to build theoretical software that is not currently possible with what is available today and then you come back when the new model comes out. They welcome you with open arms and they don't charge you to use it and they do a lot of heavy lifting without much of a cap. The point of this is to you mention that you do not need millions, probably even hundreds of thousands of parameters for your basic tasks that you are too lazy to handle yourself. I honestly am not so sure what any of you are doing with open claw when cursor builds much better software. In my professional opinion, the most effective way to utilize open claw is by building your own decision tree or something similar that has a pretty rigid process and follows exactly what it should do without thinking. You guys would be amazed to know that you can build a fully functional model that does everything you need and completes every task a customer will ask for with a 12 KB file it runs with less than 15% of your total compute on four cores and takes less than 2 GB of RAM on a web server. It provides instant response with no processing delay. It knows exactly what the customer is asking and matches it up with the correct response. It is able to process images using data sets which are also very lightweight because they are specific to your business. So next time you try to set up openclaw, ask whatever AI you're using just to rip out the apis that comes with and build your own model which you will host on your local system server. You might need to ask it to refactor for firebase or whoever else you're going to be hosting with. Go ahead and keep paying digitalocean $6 a month for the worst VM I've ever seen. That's a great investment and their current best practices go against the current best practices that open claw recommends, so I would not recommend any third party providers, even if they are worth $5 billion because they do not maintain as fast as openclaw ships. Any questions I'm available but I probably don't want to help you unless you're paying me a lot of money because I and I'm kind of a big deal in case you can't tell.
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.
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.In some sense, hallucinations as a problem have been solved already - their rate of occurrence seems much lower than that of people failing to read what is written instead of what they hoped it would be.
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.
Obviously not with Napster, but they will close your account for piracy.
I've been a pay-as-you-go API user from the beginning, carefully managing my context and usage while also leveraging cheaper, open alternatives to those overpriced "SOTA" models. I'm paying ~6 USD a month and I'm using it quite a lot.
lol, funny that this time they can't say "malicious users from china!"
Don't want to risk losing access to your Google Photos, Drive, Gmail, etc.
Although from a brief read, it seems the user still has access to other Google services.
Don't want to risk loosing access to your Google Photos, Drives, Gmail, etc.
Although at a brief read, it seems the user still have access to other Google services.
Exactly my kind of humor.
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.
People accounts shouldn't be used by bots. That's what service accounts are for.
Who in their right might thinks it's a good idea to use something they pay a NAMED SUBCRIPTION FOR as a secondary engine in another tool?
Like, it's hilarious some of you guys think it's OC's fault for this.
It's open source software, with extensive documentation that anything you do with it being at your own risk.
It's no one's fault but the people plugging their oauth into this thing like complete MORONS lol
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.
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.
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.
We aren't, though. They think we are :-/
The reality is that tokens are the second-lowest value link in the AI value-chain (the lowest-value item being electricity).
These providers are operating low down in the value chain; they are trying to sell a fungible, easy replaceable and (if hardware price trends is any indication) easily self-hostable.
They have no secret sauce, no moat. If they jack up the prices, their users will simply move to the next provider, and repeat ad nauseum as long as VCs want to subsidise in the hope of a landgrab.
1) Stand up a service 2) ??? 3) Profit
??? - worry about any substantial support later
What later? You still can't get support from Google beyond their "community forum" with their condescending volunteer "diamond product experts" who have no power to help with anything account related.
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
1. Can a company change their ToS to clarify that you can't "hack" their Oauth for other tools -- Yes, no question
2. Should they enforce the ToS, absolutely
The elephant in the room is Google has no support infrastructure and setup no notice drip campaign before they started banning out-right.
They could've easily rate-limited or even blocked requests authed from apps outside Anti-gravity, but banning entire accounts is pretty ridiculous. It'll just lose them very eager AI enthusiasts who are the audience they NEED to grow their new experiments.
It's bad business and not in their best long-term interests. Big fail. This is the way a startup may act because they're going broke on traffic -- not Google.
all hosted by companies so huge they consider your $200/month to be an annoyance
rather than something valuable
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.
Meanwhile the rising popularity of Claws creates a yet untapped new market segment where users spend significant tokens.
A „soft“ migration of users by explaining to them how the API works, how to pay and how to change from OAuth would be way smarter.
The way this plays out right now is that current Claws users are massively penalized by being suspended indefinitely and new users will think twice. And we can expect a solid PR disaster / Streisand effect for the „poor“ model providers like OpenAI or Anthropic.
Commercially choosing the soft route by warning and throttling will be way smarter and possibly generate more long term revenue
Google's response is to restrict access — a blunt instrument that punishes legitimate users because they have no way to verify which agents were behaving correctly and which weren't.
The real fix isn't restrictions, but cryptographic behavioral commitments — agents declare what they'll do before execution, and any third party can verify compliance after. We don't need gatekeepers. We need verification.
I've been building this: https://github.com/agbusiness195/NOBULEX
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.
The GH issue trackers were full of people bitching and moaning about it. I think it might be a worse thing to alienate your users who use your product in the intended way - through Google's tooling.
But I agree the 0 strike rule seems really excessive.
It is also a possible scenario that a single individual sets up 10+ AI Pro subscriptions to blast through tokens like crazy - not sure how the economics of the daily allowances compare to the API pricing here.
It's not unusual that 10% of users use up 80% of the capacity; first saw this when home internet started getting ubiquitous.
By dropping the problematic 10%, the remaining 90% are:
a. Much happier, and
b. Much more profitable for the provider.
Resulting in a sustainable service for those who don't abuse the hell out o the ToS/FUP.
He was right.
The only reason the subs are worth it to them, is to get you into their toolchain. It sucks but inevitable
They could have easily just blocked the Gemini / Antigravity use and and/or sent a "final warning" kind of email beforehand.
It looks like its been found. The irony is, these model providers are now saying : "not like that!"
1) Switching between LLM API:s is incredibly easy if you are not concerned with differences in personality. As the models get better, it is less important to pick the best one.
2) The products built to bundle the API with a user experience are difficult to build on a level that outclasses open source alternatives.
3) Building an understanding of the user to increase the product value over time and create stickiness is effective, but imho less effective over time as time passes and the user changes. For example, I suspect that these adaptations have a hard time to unlearn things that are no longer true. Learning about the user opaquely is less useful to the user and doing it overtly makes it easier to take the learnings and go. (Besides, it is probably not legal under the GDPR to not let the user export the learnings and take them to another provider.)
Taken together, the moat becomes quite shallow. I see why they aggressively ban any tools demonstrating when open alternatives are in fact better than their own walled gardens.
edit: readability.
Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game.
Then someone shares the exploit with a bunch of script kiddies, they exploit it to the Nth degree, and the company immediately notices and shuts everyone down.
Like, my dudes, what did you think was going to happen?
You treasure these little tricks, use them cautiously, and only share them sparingly. They can last for years if you carefully fly under the radar, before they're fixed by accident when another system is changed. THEN you share tales of your exploits for fame and internet points.
And instead, you integrate your exploit into hip new thing, share it at scale, write blog posts and short form video content about it, basically launch a DDoS against the service you're exploiting, and then are shocked when the exploit gets patched and whine about your free thing getting taken away?
Like, what did you expect was going to happen?
> Like, a corporation had a weakness you could exploit to get free/cheap thing. Fair game.
From a pure hacker perspective, I'm surprised there are people calling a legitimate usage a "weakness you could exploit"?
What weakness? What exploit? People have been using it in a way that was technically possible. And they paid for it, many purchased the product specifically because of it.
Then Google unilaterally changed the TOS of a product people already purchased and started pulling the rug. And again, there are people who call themselves hackers who approve of that? Even worse, they call people calling out Google for their monopolistic behavior whining.
If so, I don't think anybody who knows how auth works could feign complete innocence.
"The gate code is 1234" "If you punch in this code it tricks the phone network into thinking you're an operator" "The credentials 'guest'/'guest' work on this network".
You probably could have had five, ten people using the Antigravity API key for whatever and even if someone noticed it probably wouldn't have been worth the time to fix.
But it's like you learn the gate code for the employee parking lot and instead of just quietly enjoying free parking you start punching in the code and waving more and more cars into the lot until it's jammed full, and then complain when the code's changed and they post a guard outside checking IDs.
It's technically possible, but Google didn't provide a feature allowing the creation of Antigravity or Gemini CLI API keys for use outside the respective apps.
Google's monopoly is not in AI, it's advertisement. When you accuse them of ridiculous and unfounded crimes, you're diluting the chance of Google being held accountable. As someone that wants to see Google ripped apart by the FTC, we can't just lie and say everything Google does is criminal.
$249/mo isn't cheap
It's the same with vulnerabilities in slot machines. Damn rare but they exist - in 2014, when I worked in that industry, one gang made a big bang: in a single night, casinos across Germany had to say goodbye to probably 10 million € [1]. Of course, that vulnerability made massive waves... but from what I heard back then, it had been circulating for many months beforehand. Of course, 10 million € is nothing to sneeze at, but keeping a low profile could have made everyone in the know far more profit.
[1] https://www.t-online.de/digital/aktuelles/id_68982394/softwa...
(See Napster.)
* User uses Google oauth to integrate their open claw
* user gets banned from using Google AI services with no warning
* user still gets charged
If you go backwards, getting charged for services you can't access is rough. I feel sorry for those who are deeply integrated into Google services or getting banned on their main accounts. It's not a great situation.
Also, getting banned without warning is rough as well. I wonder if the situation will be different for business accounts as opposed what seems like personal accounts?
The ban itself seems fair though, google is allowed to restrict usage of their services. Even though it's probably not developer friendly, it's within their rights to do so.
I guess there's some level of post mortem to do on the openclaw side too.
* Why did openclaw allow Google anti gravity logins?
* The plugin is literally called "google-antigravity-auth", why didn't that give the signal to the maintainers?
* Why don't the maintainers, for an integration project, do due diligence checks on the terms of service of everything you're integrating with?
"We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users. We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users."
> 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.
Either stick to first party products or pay for API use.
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
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
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.
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.
A buffet is saying "pay $X to eat food one plate at a time [up to 100 lbs of food]", and you show up and start shoveling the food into your bag. Does not really matter if we remove the 100lbs part.
Could you technically eat the same amount of food one plate a time? Sure. But if everyone does this, $X needs to be significantly more: even for the people who eat one plate at a time.
-
You could also argue they're playing a mean trick and deceiving people because technically someone could eat the same amount of food 1 plate at a time...
But they priced $X based on how much the average person can eat, not how much food they can carry in their arms. If the limits are so high that people don't leave hungry eating 1 plate at a time, it still seems like a fair deal.
I'm not exactly the type to jump for joy at siding with a corporation, but I really don't get why people are in a hurry to ruin a good thing.
Seems like you're okay with honoring the terms of service, then? Because the client you can use is also in the terms of service.
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?
What an awful way to lose trust, locking out their users but billing them all the same.
[1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
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.
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...
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?
it seems like the main problem with OpenCode and OpenClaw is that they call the API directly bypassing the website
my approach is browser automation, its technically against the ToS too but there's default mechanisms to avoid unintentional mass spam.
I think what pissed off Google and Anthropic was that people were running through multiple accounts from OpenCode and ruined it for everybody else
Sounds like the same here. Are they against to ToS in either case?
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.
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.
For example the EU DNA (entirely not enough but in the right direction).
We should have the right to use our accounts as we wish.
It's the right-to-repair applied to software.
Abuse is something else entirely.
I just assumed it was a warning about security breaches, not business plan breaches.
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.
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
When people grab OAuth tokens for replay in OpenClaw, they are essentially doing at the user level what malicious skills do at the agent level — bypassing intended access controls because the system has no way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate use.
This is the same pattern showing up everywhere: - 312,000 instances on Shodan with no auth (CyberSecurityNews) - 40,000+ exposed instances (SecurityScorecard this week) - 824+ malicious skills in ClawHub - Infostealers now grabbing entire agent identities (Hudson Rock)
The common thread: agents operate with broad, undifferentiated access. No permission tiers, no credential isolation, no audit trail.
Until the ecosystem adds proper trust layers at both the platform level (what Google is clumsily trying to do here) and the host level (monitoring what agents actually do with their access), this cat-and-mouse will continue.
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.
And as far as I understand, the main contingent of HN is engineers, programmers, and even me, who works in a country (Russia) where the salary of an engineer is just tiny compared to Europe or the United States, it was not difficult to buy powerful enough equipment to run most large local models, train lora, then programmers who earn income in six-digit dollars it's even easier to do this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073097
I'd like to add, that's "priceless" for "them" and not for you.
The real issue is that we're building entire development workflows on subsidized inference that was never priced to be used this way.
OpenClaw burns tokens at a rate these $200/month plans were never designed for.
The fix isn't nicer ban policies, it's either honest API pricing or local models good enough for the job.
The 0.5B-3B parameter range is already surprisingly capable for code analysis tasks.
That's where this is heading whether Google likes it or not.
OpenClaw went from virtually unheard of to a sensation in a couple weeks. There was intense commit activity and the main author bragged about not even reading the code himself. It was all heavily AI driven and moving at an extreme rate. Everyone was competing to get their commits in because they wanted to be a part of it.
The entire project was a fast and furious experiment. Nobody was stopping to think if something was a good idea or not when someone published a plugin for using this endpoint. People just thought “cool!” and installed it.
But I guess it's only ok when you work on regular joe facing projects, where the consequences of bugs are on powerless users. If the consequences are on Google, well, that's not acceptable now is it?
Agreed. The lesson is: do not become dependent on Google. Ever.
(Unfortunately I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. Long-term I hope to find alternatives to both problems. Google search I no longer need because Google already ruined it a few years ago; the quality now is just horrible. I can not find anything useful with it anymore.)
> Hoping for some transparency, I left a single, polite comment asking for clarification on why the update was removed. Surprisingly, my forum account was banned shortly after posting that question.
I could see a problem with logging into Antigravity then exfiltrating the tokens to use somewhere else... But that doesn't sound like what happened. (And then how would they know?)
I haven't used Open Claw, so what else am missing to make this make sense?
When I first tried OpenClaw and chose Google Sign-In, I noticed the window appeared saying "Sign into Google Antigravity" with a Google official mark, and a warning it shouldn't be used to sign into anything besides official Google apps. I closed it immediately and uninstalled OpenClaw as this was suspicious to me, and it was a relatively new project then.
It amazes me that the maintainer(s) allowed something like this...
2. Did a human create the plugin?
3. Are the maintainers human?
By human I mean an animal that is intelligent enough to understand the agreements and what code they are writing.
I feel that sometimes corporations have all 3 montesquieu powers. Google can define eulas, decide if you should be punished, and apply a ban.
Can a shop decide who to serve? I may be wrong, but big tech should not be able to 'just close' accounts, or demonetize accounts on their whim.
There's a good chance the plugin was written by gemini, why did it allow that?
It feels like a good default for this would be something similar to video game bans: where you get a "vacation" from the service with a clear reason for why that is, but can return to using it later. Given how much people depend on cloud services, permanent bans for what could be honest mistakes or not knowing stuff would be insane.
Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move.
BUT: The industry is missing a significant long term revenue opportunity here. There obviously is latent demand and Claws have a great product market fit. Why on earth would you deactivate customers that show high usage? Inform them that you have another product (API keys) for them and maybe threaten with throttling. But don't throw them overboard! Find a solution that makes commercial sense for both sides (security from API bill shock for the customer / predictable token usage for the provider).
What we're seeing right now is the complete opposite. Ban customers that might even rely on their account. Feels like the accountants have won this round - but did not expect the PR backlash and possible Streisand effect...
It's not hard to define a quota system and enforce it. If the quota is too high then reduce the quota. If people are abusing the quota with automated requests then detect that and rate limit those users.
If I'm paying $200+ a month I should be able to saturate Google with requests. It's up to Google to enforce their policies via backpressure so that they don't get overloaded.
Then again this is the same company that suspended people's gmail because they sent too many emotes in YouTube chat. Sadge.
Antigravity has very low daily and weekly quotas unless you pay for their most expensive plan, so it means these people drop $200+ a month to run these bots, insanity
Are they though? Another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205) seems to indicate these people are all indefinitely suspended with no path to unsuspend them:
> [...] 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. [...]
There is a (pretty generous and imo reasonable) request quota that reset every 24h
The whole concept of service "abusers" is made up bullshit by companies that over promise, over sell and under deliver.
That's not what support has been telling their $250 a month customers.
we are unable to reverse the suspension [1]
I get the need to move fast to stabilise the service but similar to an outage it doesn't take much to put a banner on the support page to let customers know bans are temporary until they can come up with a better way of educating customers. Further more it doesn't much to instruct ban appeal teams to tell customers all bans are under review no matter what the reason is to buy them time to separate Claw bans from legitimate abuse bans that need to be upheld.
The fact that users are paying $250 for a service they can't use for at least the last 11 days kills any sympathy I had that Google needed "quickly shut off access", it's like they just sat on their hands until the social media storm hit flash-point.
After 11 days there still isn't even an official statement, just a panicked tweet from a dev likely also getting hammered on socials, goodness knows how long before accounts are restored and credits issued.
Even the original Google employee in the forum thread just ghosted everyone there after the initial "we're looking into it".
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.
How can Claws users miss this?
What Google could have done better: obviously implement rate throttling on API calls authenticated through the Gemini AI Pro $20/month accounts. (I thought they did this, buy apparently not?) Google tries hard to get people to get API keys, which is what I do, and there seems to be a very large free tier on API calls before my credit card gets hit every month.
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 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.
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.
Next I tried using the Antigravity Gemini plan through OpenCode (I guess also a bannable offense?) and the first request used up my limit for the week.
What the hell do you expect? To get paid for using other people's tools on Google's servers?
I haven't tried Antigravity but I remember on release it had huge UX issues. Is this product just not ready for primetime?
BTW, I tend to only use Google for services I pay for (YouTube+, APIs, Gemini Plus, sometimes GCP).
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.
You are doing groundbreaking new and untested stuff with Claw? Do not use your main account. You want to access your main account's data? Sure, allow it via OAUTH/whatever possible way.
Have separate accounts, people. You don't want one product groups decision in those large SaaS corps to impact everything else.
Getting through to customer support was impossible.
5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.
My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.
1) Open Claw has a Google OAuth client id that users are signing in with. (This seems unlikely because why would Google have approved the client or not banned it)
2) Users are creating their own OAuth client id for signing themselves into Open Claw. (Again, why would these clients be able to use APIs Google doesn't want them to?)
3) Users are taking a token minted with the Antigravity client and using it in Open Claw to call "private" APIs.
Assuming it's #3, how is that physically accomplished? And then how does Google figure out it happened?
Everything just guesswork, but I don't think it is too hard to figure out whether it is Antigravity calling the APIs or any Claw.
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.
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.
The apparent shock around this sort of thing always feels like cope for the fact that we (myself included) understand the power imbalance between Google and its customers but don't want to admit it.
There's plenty of evidence at this point, and I feel like we should be using that emotional energy to actually do something about it (like switching providers for critical personal services, for example).
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 feel like this game is just a hot potato, can you get retail to hold the bag game
Kimi K2.5 is the best one, but it's still not at the level of what Anthropic released with opus 4.5.
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.
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.
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/...
I had buyers remorse when the first hour or two I kept getting rate limited on GLM5, but since then i've not had a single rate limit and I am using it very heavily.
Suddenly instead of writing the code you asked for it would give some generic bullet points telling you to find a library to do what you asked for and read the documentation.
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.
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.
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.
Running software has always had a variable cost.
Why should I be surprised if [cloud provider] were upset that I were running a thousand free tier servers? Or utilizing any paid plan at all to somehow effect utilizations far exceeding the clearly documented limitations of my plan?
Using the torrent network protocol on a VPN that doesn't support it, or fork bombing an email server, or using that one popular free video hosting service to host nigh unlimitted arbritrary data, or hosting content that is illegal to the server operator regardless of its legality to me, etc, etc, etc
It's all the same thing: TOS violation.
No one is being forced to use these products without reading and signing the terms of service. In this particular instance, you can even use the free version of the provided service to analyze the terms of service for the paid plan if you were really so lazy.
I really am genuinely confounded as to why people are so regularly surprised that they can't just do whatever they please with proprietary solutions. Like "oh what do you mean I can't lie about the date of my injury in order to get it covered by insurance?".
It's almost like people just assume that everything ever works exactly as they would deam it to (in their benefit), rather than the much more sane assumption that every company is going to be naturally inclined to cater to their own benefit before the users'.
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
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.
If it makes you feel any better, some google employees have their personal accounts banned too (only Gemini access, not the whole account) for running opeclaw, and also have a hard time getting their account reinstated.
The financial costs would clearly be ruinous.
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?
It's embarrassingly trivial, IMO - compare what antigravity reports for token to what the backend reports for token usage for that user.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They got rid of their "Don't be evil" motto for a reason, after all.
could you elaborate on why this is true? I can't think of any.
>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.
A curious person or two poking around is one thing.
A few hundred, or thousands, of "AI enthusiasts," or however you'd like to imagine OpenClaw users, could likely approach the scale of "a problem."
Another example is home internet connections. They're unmetered where I live, but I'm also told I can't run public internet services on it. Why? Because with "personal/home usage" there's just a practical limit to how much I can use my ~1Gbps pipe, whereas if I ran a public service I might max out that pipe. I'm a pretty heavy user (~60GB a day), but that's a world of difference from the >10TB I could theoretically hit.
> but I really don't get why people are in a hurry to ruin a good thing
This is the crux of it. I like services limited by practicality because they're a heck of a lot cheaper. If people want more usage there's always API billing, they just have to pay for what they're actually using.
It doesn't mean that it's the only thing they're doing, could be they have the plan for other purposes, and also use it for that.
Because it'll be an LLM guided bot handing out bans, so no one will actually KNOW why.
Google said that because I had more secure 2FA methods configured it wouldn't allow my to use one of the methods that I had very intentionally configured for exactly this scenario. My opinion of the company was already pretty low but I was still shocked that they would simply discard my security settings without any warning or override option. They made one of the worst trips of my life even more miserable. Google hates their own users so much.
Either way, for everyone else: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
There's the direct link to the specific post.
This has been standard in the VC playbook for the last decade or so. The only moat these companies have is the size of their war chests.
ChatGPT web has been doing this for a week now, for me. Ask some technical question and get a reply absolutely filled with AI phrases (Not $X, Just $Y, the key insight, the deeper insight, etc) dominating about 50% of the text, with the remaining 50% some generic filler stuff partially related to the tech I asked.
Last night I read through a ChatGPT web response about solutions for a security bootstrapping problem without holding keys/password, and it spat out pages and pages of key insights, all nicely numbered sections with bullet points in each section, without actually answering the question.
Moved to Claude Web immediately, got a usable answer on the first try.
this was the experience for some claude subscribers just a couple weeks ago:
1. download opencode
2. select claude as a model
3. browser window opens, asking you to sign in. typical oauth screen.
4. everything works, prompt away
5. some days/weeks pass
6. you get permanently banned
now if you add one warning email just before step (6.) then that doesn't really help. what if it bounces? what if people don't check their emails? put a big flashy red warning into claude code? sure, but what if users accidentally dismiss it or simply do not understand it (non tech folks, non native english speakers)
its just the friendly and correct thing to do, in my opinion
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.
It's no different than using Claude Code directly.
> OAuth authentication (used with Free, Pro, and Max plans) is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service — including the Agent SDK — is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/legal-and-compliance#authent...
You cannot authenticate with anything but Claude Code and Claude.ai.
But you do not need to authenticate with Claude Agent SDK (even though you can using env variables).
When you authenticate with Claude Code (allowed), Claude Agent SDK works without any further authentication.
It's really annoying that people keep trying to make this complicated because the inevitable end result is that they remove authless usage of the Agent SDK and save themselves the headache.
I really hate Clawdb-Moltb-OpenC-NanoCode or whatever half-baked project the grifters are on this week for ruining a good thing for the rest of us.
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.
I’m sure they went with reusing the generic completions API to iterate faster and make it easier to support both subscription and pay-per-token users in the same client, but it feels like they’re burning trust/goodwill when a technical solution could at least be attempted.
Reminds me I gotta eventually write up what I found reverse-engineering the one armed bandit in my basement LOL
The difference is that in this case the agent loop is executed, which has all the caching and behaviour guarantees. What I assume OpenClaw is doing is calling the endpoint directly while retaining its own "agent logic" so it doesn't follow whatever conventions is the backend expecting.
How important is that difference, I can't say, but aside the cost factor I assume Google doesn't want to subsidize agents that aren't theirs and in some way "the competition".
Yes. The only reason they subsidise all-you-can-prompt subscriptions is to collect additional data / signals. They can use those signals to further improve their models.
Either the token works for all times, or works until it doesn't, or does not work at all.
Punishing the account for using a token you have vended for the exact same purpose is extremely poor product design.
It's supposed to be hard to leave.
I'm just grateful they at least have takeout.
I understand how grabbing an oauth token via reverse engineering could be a ToS violation. But there's no other purpose for the `-p` flag other than to use it with a wrapper. Unless people enjoy having interactive conversations via non-interactive mode for some reason.
Even their documentation clearly states this flag exists for "building custom AI tools" [1]. How is OpenCode, OpenClaw etc not a "custom AI tool", where exactly is the line drawn?
This is just a rug pull.
[1] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/blob/c7237f0c795...
Tokens like those generated by the gemini CLI, accounted to the user and metered so you're charged every million or so tokens.
Tokens like those internal to the Antigravity app, accounted to the product (which is why this was noticed -- the resources allotted to the app were being exhausted) and not metered per token (which is why everyone was trying to use them for everything).
As the other commenter said, the first person to do this definitely knew what they were doing. All the script kiddies who piled on after, probably not, but that's also part of why "script kiddy" is a derogatory term. Not only do they usually not understand the scripts they run, they also typically do not understand the risks associated with them.
On one side you had the argument that repealing net neutrality would mean you can save money on your internet bill by only paying for access to what you use. On the other, you had the argument that it would just enable companies to milk you for even more profit and throttle your connection as they see fit.
IMO we need 'net neutrality' for LLM clients. I feel like AI companies are hypocrites for talking about safety all the time, but want us to only use their LLMs in the way they intend. They're saying we're all going to be replaced by AI in 12 months, and we have to use their tools to survive, right?
Yann LeCun recently warned that the AI coming out of China is trending towards being more open than the American alternative. If it continues like this, I can see programmers being pushed towards Chinese models. Is that what the US government wants?
Says who? You?
The customer? Who always wants a lower price?
Most companies want to make money. They would use this opportunity to upsell these high value customers to a more expensive plan with higher limits.
Google, which has some kind of dutch disease from making too much easy money from advertising, sees people trying to give them large amounts of money and thinks "How dare they attempt to buy our services? They're getting banned!"
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.
Yes, we are surprised. Google understands our surprise, too. To quote the Google employee another commenter mentioned: "We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on"
>Account Remediation Pathway
>Introduced a formal remediation process for accounts suspended due to Terms of Service violations. See our official announcement.
I would still consider OpenAI naming incorrect, but between the 3, they kind of are, open.
OpenClaw doesn't need the creator in order to continue to be a reputation risk nightmare for all of the AI companies, though.
Yes, that's what he said.
Not really. There’s a difference between accelerating development in the hands of an experienced developer versus having somebody just slop code by hoping for the best.
Adopting AI doesn’t equal removing code review. These were two separate choices combined.
Search for "review": 0 matches.
Of course the fine print says to review, just like the ultimate control of the "full self driving" rests with the human driver. But why is the fine print fine, and not large as the large print? Maybe because you're not supposed to pay attention to it? Could this be?
Firefox would be able to survive without Google, even though it currently chooses not to. Mozilla is not Firefox any more than Linux Foundation is Linux.
I imagine Open Claw must also have registered the Antigravity custom URL scheme in order to receive the redirect.
Remaining question is how Google determines that traffic is not actually coming from Antigravity.
Spiralling here: high volumes, and tool calls that are not typical for an agentic IDE.
Still surprised.
Client ID ok.
But openclaw needs the secret also?
Does it also mean Antigravity did not restrict to specific applications?
This is true of all OAuth client logins in this way, it's why the secret doesn't mean the same thing as it does with server to server login, you can never fully trust the client.
OAuth impersonation is nothing new, it's a well known attack vector that can't really be worked around (without changing the UX), the solution is instead terms of service, policies, and enforcement.
Really? In today's landscape this is the part that surprises you? I'm seeing these types of decisions repeatedly and typically my only question is do they not know any better, or intentionally not care?
I subscribe to the AI Pro plan. I knew of a published limit of 100 Pro prompts per day, but before this month it seemed they were relaxed about it. I have now started to be rate limited on Pro when nowhere near that quota, due to too many prompts within a short time window (probably due to short prompts and not aggregating my questions). So now I use the Thinking (basically Flash) model and bump up to Pro for certain queries only.
There will always be a minority who spoil it for the majority.
Unless there is something I'm missing
This was a temporary rate limit and it told me to try again at a specified time which wasn’t far away. That’s different.
However, it could have been because of a temporary capacity issue. I hope so.
No, the first party tools, even if they used the same number of tokens, gives them valuable data for their training.
Essentially, the first party tools are subsidised because it saves them money on gathering even more training data. When you use a 3rd party tool, you are expected to pay the actual cost of each token.
I'm surprised that Anthropic's price is the same as their licensees.
This is actually the soft-touch approach: the users of these vibe-coded products need to understand that they are delegating their authority to the tool to work on their behalf.
In this case, they delegated to a tool that broke the ToS. The result could have been a lot worse, and in return they learned that the tool is acting with their full authority.
-----------------
EDIT:
One of the users got this response from google support:
> 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.
Their decision? To break ToS on some other provider:
> I guess it is time to move on to Codex or Claude Code.
So, yeah, perhaps the users really are too stupid to understand what's going on, and even this soft-touch approach has done nothing to clue them in.
In contrast Google's AI plans give you at least three seperate pools of token usage limits: Gemini App + Antigravity/Other Code Assist tools like Android Studio + AI Studio free usage limits.
Google limit the context of where you can use their tokens but in exchange they give you substantially more.
Good luck opening new google accounts for separation of concern. The new account is banned before the eula page finishes loading.
Google sends code via text msg to my main account phone number to unban, without me ever even filling a phone number.
After a day the account was banned again and pending automatic deletion. The appeal then took an artificial 5 days wait. I had to plead to what I presume is an AI. I had just paid $100 so it's not like I didn't show I was serious.
I am fairly certain that if they ban one account they will also ban the other anyways.
Google forbids you to have multiple identities. It's stated clear in their term of service. Any account you create must be linked to the same identity.
This means that it is trivial for them to ban all your accounts at once.
This also means that the 2factor is difficult to separate. Somebody with an unlocked access to my phone can hijack all my Google accounts by starting a password recovery.
Even though I made sure to never share my phone number to the new account, and I never loggued with it on my phone, and used a different browser session on desktop, it still forcefully sends a notification to my phone when I login because my login is suspicious it says. There is still no phone registered on the new account.
During reinstation of the banned accout I also got a scary msg essentially saying that if they denied my appeal, they might also ban my main account. Chilling.
But honestly, this is the side of intentionally misunderstanding that's actually preferable so: "You're absolutely right! You can't use your subscription to build yet another vibeslop harness, please refrain from doing so."
The usual expectation is you don't care what agent the user is running. You just care about what they're doing with it (permissions, rate limits, etc.).
They literally did exactly that. That's what being cut off (Antigravity access, i.e. private "only for use with our client" subscription - not the whole account, btw.) for people who do "reverse engineer to use it in other tools".
Nothing here is new or surprising, the problem has been the same since Anthropic released Claude Code and the Max subscriptions - first thing people did then was trying to auth regular use with Claude Code tokens, so they don't have to pay the API prices they were supposed to.
Which is worrying, because if this continues, and if Google, who has GCP is struggling to serve requests, there's no telling what's going to happen with services like Hetzner etc.
I believe OpenAI's purchasing is somewhat overstated, it definitely has no effect on Google's current ability to serve Gemini requests, but it is obvious that there's a shortage of most components, and it's also obvious that even internally Google is having to make hard choices about who to let use GPUs when.
I definitely think OpenAI likely has less use for GPUs than Google. Google has $300B in annual revenue vs. $20B for OpenAI. Even if you assume 100% of OpenAI's revenue is going to renting GPUs and they are taking a 50% loss there's still a lot of room for Google to be profitable and spending more money on GPUs, and not have enough GPUs. Google also just has a wider variety of models to train and run, from Waymo to Search to whatever advertising models.
A better explanation is to point out that ChatGPT is still far and away the most popular AI product on the planet right now. When ChatGPT has so many more users, multi-tenant economic effects are stronger, taking advantage of a larger number of GPUs. Think of S3: requests for a million files may load them from literally a million drives due to the sheer size of S3, and even a huge spike from a single customer fades into relatively stable overall load due to the sheer number of tenants. OpenAI likely has similar hardware efficiencies at play and thus can afford to be more generous with spikes from individual customers using OpenCode etc.
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.
I'm paraphrasing here of course. But it doesn't seem impossible. I mean I don't think it's easy either. I also want to add that I don't want to live in a world with only one search engine.
It's just that the last time we had to deal with their customer support, they were so bad someone at the exec level said they were banned from now on. It's to the point we have to explicitely schedule high level meetings and carve out exceptions when they happen to buy products we use.
We work with nearly everyone in the cloud space except Google. That should tell you everything you need to know.
Adopting a massive dependency on a single company is generally a mistake.
It's hard to avoid the massive dependencies, especially if you're starting small and moving fast, because something like Google Workspace or MS 360 or Slack is cost-competitive compared to spinning up your own internal stack of tooling. At least until it isn't, but hopefully your startup has grown enough by then that it can afford to address these concerns.
There are probably some boundaries set by Google's legal team, especially for Workspace.
There’s been varying degrees of ease of migrating mail out of mailboxes, though.
Curious anyone recently has had an easy time on both ends, and no regrets.
At least it was when we could afford hard drives.
Very very happy with it.
In the past I just use DuckDuckGo for most search, occasionally Google. That also worked well for me.
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.
They are being banned (not suspended) for breaking the ToS, not for what you imagine them to be suspended for.
It doesn't matter how expensive a provider plan you purchase, the provider is free to end their contract with you, permanently if they want to, if you breach their terms of service.
You also get the same freedom.
Kagi indirectly funds the Kremlin's regime by paying for Yandex API access.
I don’t see how it’s not subsidized substantially considering how much money they’re burning right now (I only base that on their rounds though).
Anthropic (as the ever-chosen example) has explicitly stated they've made more money than they've spent on training when they sell/serve a particular model in the past. They said that the reason they're negative is the next model costs more than the "profit" they've made on the previous one. This wasn't strict financial disclosures, but I'd presume this means that their data center costs (eg. power, hardware, etc) are baked into that, but probably not company-wide costs like marketing.
They do have several sources of revenue, all tied to their models: APIs, Subscriptions, and model licensing. Their licensing and APIs most likely have a positive margin -> the money they make to serve the n+1 customer is more than the cost to serve that customer, on a per-financial-transaction basis. It's speculated that they lose money per-customer to serve the subscriptions, and they eat that cost... for various potential reasons.
Saying ”we’re positive except the foundation of the company (training models) isn’t” is a tell tale sign.
And I’m sure Anthropic is doing what most others are doing, heavily massaging numbers to make them look good for VC rounds.
Why would WebChat users need a subscription? It's free; I've even pasted tarballs of entire repos in there, and haven't hit limits!
>
> More limited features, like lack of model selection, more restricted use of “thinking” models.
Yeah, but... do the "chat" users actually care about any of that? Would they even notice a difference?
My point is that, if all you're doing is chat, there's no value in any of the subscription models - for chat the free webapps are more than sufficient, so even someone spending the whole day chatting about something isn't going to hit any limits.
I somewhat agree, somewhat disagree with this. I think API based is not subsidised. If you do some basic napkin math they should have enough room there to serve the models below cost if the models aren't insanely large (you can compare with 3rd party openrouter offerings and have an idea of what $/Mtok you can serve per model size. e.g. Haiku level models can be ~700B tokens and still be profitably served)
I think 20-200$ all-you-can-prompt are likely subsidised. If you track token usage (there are many 3rd party tools that do this) you can get 4-5x the API usage out of them (it used to be even higher before they added weekly limits. People were seeing 10-20x usage). Now I think that's a bit tough to make the napkin math work out. I've compared sessions served over API with sessions from subscriptions, and you get much more usage out of them, even with 5h / weekly limits. Strictly for coding, I think they're subsidising them.
I somewhat disagree that they're doing it for market share / user lock-in. I think signals and usage trends are much more valuable for them. While there might be user retention for "casual" users (i.e. web) I think the power users in coding will move as soon as the competition has a better product. So at the end of the day having data to improve models and have the "best" model in a niche is more productive than retaining users with an inferior product. That is an assumption tho, and there isn't much math you can do to figure that out from the outside.
This is more likely to occur on $20 plans though, especially since those are often necessary to unlock the more useful features (e.g. deep research) so people might be paying for that even if they don't actually use the tokens.
OTOH someone who's paying $200 will likely want to squeeze the most out of their subscription for that amount of money. So I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that $20 users are subsidizing the $200 ones.
Maybe I am out of touch but I struggle why folks are surprised by this. I would argue that banning accounts is probably too harsh but we will see if that is a short term remedy.
There is a reason that in general the cost of a token via API is more expensive than when using the consumer tool.
Literally the entire buzz around all this AI stuff is that it lets you automate stuff and do more things faster. Why would you not expect people to automate their interactions with the AI service itself? AI automating its own interactions with itself is what all the AI companies are pushing as the immediate future and paradigm shift for everyone to hop onto.
> google would be tracking who people's partners are
is a misunderstanding of that comment. Nothing they said implies that Google is tracking who people's partners are. You're welcome to have whatever opinions you are about companies, but I'd also hope that you're careful not to read conspiracies into places where they aren't stated, especially in about institutions you have preconceptions about.
Whether it is tracked explicitly or implicitly, the idea that there is a matrix that establishes your linkage to other accounts is the bit that I take issue with because the conclusion for me is that Google is able to infer things about the people they hold data on that they never ever should have access to.
If you have a credible alternative explanation of what it does mean then you are welcome to supply that but instead you are making statements that are unverifiable:
> Nothing they said implies that Google is tracking who people's partners are.
That's a very, very thin line because if Google can figure out which account to ban and which account to let live because they are close enough that without that matrix the two would be seen as the same entity then that's already many levels of privacy violation too far. Being able to derive who is partner with whom once you have that data is trivial, whether Google actually does this or not is irrelevant because you can't prove a negative.
You are well into the territory of defending the indefensible here and I'm giving you a lot of leeway because you most likely have a mortgage and a bunch of other responsibilities but effectively you are defending your employer from a claim of gathering data without consent. Which - as I probably don't need to remind you - is a massive violation of privacy.
This all revolves around implied ability, I don't give a rats ass about whether or not there is an actual implementation of that ability - as it seems you do -, Google should not have this capability because I did not consent to its tracking of the relationships of my accounts vis-a-vis other accounts. Legal basis for data processing and informed consent are both staples of privacy law.
I know that both of these, but especially consent are difficult topics for Google, they seem to approach these things from a 'we can therefore we will' angle and that has resulted time and again in them being found on the wrong side of the lines of ethics and legality. This is just one more little nail in that particular coffin.
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.
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?
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.
Should Netflix for instance not invested money from renting DVDs to invest in a streaming service?
Apple not use the profits it was making from selling Apple //e’s to create the Mac?
They do, though - you're free to buy tokens and use Google's AI/LLM via the API?
What OpenClaw was doing was pretending to be a different product (Anti gravity) in order to use the cheaper tier.
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.
They just disabled Antigravity access.
it has the chilling effect - people getting banned by google might imagine their entire google account getting banned (whether that's true or not is irrelevant).
Yes, please!
Two - the usage pattern was Shaun's toc but not obviously against the spirit.
More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want" And then going: Obviously I didn't mean driving to another coast on a highway
I am afraid of using any Google services in experimental way from the fear that my whole Google existence will be banned.
I think blocking access temporarily with a warning would be much more suitable. Unblocking could be even conditioned on a request to pay for the abused tokens
The entire "ability" here is, as far as I can tell, is that it's possible to connect accounts to IP addresses. This is something that practically every system does. HN does it to stop abuse and ban-dodging. Wikipedia does it. You're reading an incredible amount of bad faith into the concept of IP bans.
> but effectively you are defending your employer from a claim of gathering data without consent.
I'm very specifically not doing that. I've made no comment on what the practices of any particular company are. Ultimately I don't know. What I do know is that the comment you're replying to doesn't say the things you keep implying. If your goal is to silence any disagreement, please feel free to continue speaking like this, but if your actually interested in engaging, I'd implore you to appreciate that I'm speaking for myself and not threaten me with..whatever you're implying here.
> This all revolves around implied ability, I don't give a rats ass about whether or not there is an actual implementation of that ability
I mean this is critical. If all you care about is the "ability" every site on the internet that you can log into has the "ability". All of them, every single one. The stance you're taking here is that a website supporting the ability to log in inherently violates your privacy because, whether or not it does, it has the ability to track information that could correlate your account with other accounts (and many of them do!)
If you signed an agreement with the grocery store that says they will ban you with no refunds for doing $FOO, and you do $FOO, then you can't expect any sympathy when you get banned, now can you?
In any case, your analogy is broken, because this is a monthly subscription, not a once-off purchase: when you pay for a month of subscription and then get banned, you don't expect to get that month's payment back.
And then, after you actually drive it for 10k km on “unauthorized” highways, they ban you.
That’s why analogies are for fucking idiots. There is a true example — you bought access to use your account for n tokens, and google got pissy that you didn’t use the tokens in their spyware ecosystem.
For you analogy loving fucks, it’s like the arcades selling their proprietary 50 cent worth token coins, that only works on their machines, when they could just accept 50 cent coins.
Then google will presumably perma-ban that user (and all accounts for that user) across all its services (gmail, etc).
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.
> ”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 totally read that (and the other posts in that forum) as a complete suspension of their whole Google Account (another person mentions their GCP access suspended).
But I could be reading it wrong and it's just their AI account (and any service that uses that... I'm not clear on where those boundaries are?)
Still not going to risk signing up for this, because I cannot risk my Google account getting suspended or banned for something I wasn't aware of in the ToS. No warnings is still drastic, even if it's just part of the account.
Not. On both counts.
That sounds like the suspension only affects those things. Not e.g. gmail.
If it makes it impossible to set up a competitor? Absolutely, yes.
> Should Netflix for instance not invested money from renting DVDs to invest in a streaming service?
Netflix was not priced below the cost of production from the beginning. You're confusing sustainable pricing and paying off all the capital spending immediately at launch.
A better example is Doordash when it was heavily subsidized by VC money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 And it now faces several anti-trust lawsuits.
Not sure that this case is either. This is just idiots breaking the TOS.
Although in this case it's probably impossible to define, given the complexity of calculating the true cost of tokens.
No.
Dumping is an international-trade term. It doesn’t even require pricing below cost, just aiming “to increase market share in a foreign market by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation where the exporter will be able to unilaterally dictate price and quality of the product” [1].
Loss leaders are common in commerce and entirely legal, as are free trials. I struggle to think of a competent jurisdiction that bans them.
Russian laws officially use the term "monopolistically low prices", and prohibit them if the entity engaging in such pricing holds a dominating presence in the market (and not necessarily for the goods that are being underpriced).
A correct term for the US is "predatory pricing", and it's also prohibited by the Sherman Act. For much the same reason, a large entity can destroy competition by accepting losses from selling goods below the cost. The border between loss leaders and predatory pricing is, as usual, very blurred.
Arguably, yes.
In other countries, selling a $7 chicken if it's subsidized by the sale of other goods can indeed be illegal.
This isn’t even vaguely similar to illegal tying. The biggest problem being that the products almost certainly aren’t dissimilar enough to be considered “tied” at all.
Second, that’s not what dumping means. It’s a specific term for international trade.
Third, it’s not illegal to sell something for below the cost to make it. That’s another common misunderstanding.
Netflix borrowed $16 billion over a decades
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/business/netflix-earnings...
Because subscriptions didn’t make enough money to fund its business. Were they being “anti competitive”?
Should Microsoft have not been allowed to sell operating systems and still survive from selling BASIC interpreters? Should Nintendo have not been allowed to sell video games and still be selling playing cards?
Every company that is interested in survival takes profits from an existing business to start a new one,
Toyota shouldn't have to sell their first new car off the line for 100 million to pay for the entire manufacturing line.
Your first SAAS customer shouldn't have to pay back all your costs.
Can you plan to break even after your first month of sales? first year? 10 years?
Amazon runs two sets of infrastructure “CDO” and “AWS”. It’s a myth that Amazon used excess capacity to start AWS. AWS was always built out as separate infrastructure outside of AWS.
Some Amazon services do run on AWS. But when Amazon runs workloads on AWS, for internal accounting, they are considered a customer.
Source: former employee at AWS
What about OpenAI?
It seems like you havent thought this through at all.
Oooh! Do you have a recommendation for a translation of a Russian economics text? I’m particularly curious of Soviet-era texts that work on theory without prices.
> correct term for the US is "predatory pricing", and it's also prohibited by the Sherman Act
Sherman prohibits the “restraint of trade or commerce” [1]. The word “price” never appears in its text. In practice, predatory pricing is a tightly-regulated term that doesn’t generally prohibit selling goods below cost
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-3055/pdf/COMPS-305...
I don't think they exist? The Soviet Union used prices internally as an accounting tool. It essentially had two separate currencies: the actual physical currency that regular people owned and the virtual "accounting" currency. The accounting currency could not be converted into the real one, except for salary payments that were tightly regulated.
Once the USSR allowed some inter-conversion channels in the early 80-s its economy predictably got blown up as a result.
> Sherman prohibits the “restraint of trade or commerce” [1]. The word “price” never appears in its text. In practice, predatory pricing is a tightly-regulated term that doesn’t generally prohibit selling goods below cost
The Sherman Act is a framing law that establishes the authority to regulate monopolies, and it's on purpose rather vague in its wording.
A more concrete law here is the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits illegal price discrimination, including pricing substantially similar goods differently for different purchasers.
e.g. the CRTC has regulations around a la carte offerings since the past decade: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/program/alacarte.htm
> TV service providers must offer channels both individually and in packages of up to 10 channels.
Probably a good idea. And it looks like Netflix simply needed to make the service a bit more expensive?
So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing? Were they going to charge their first 10,000 customers $100,000 a year so they could fund development without either borrowing money or take it from existing businesses?
> So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing?
By borrowing at market rates and pricing services to cover the loan payments.
You're actually making a good argument why cross-financing should not exist at all and that we all would probably be better without it.
And I can’t believe that this conversation just went to companies should borrow money instead of reinvesting its own profits. Really?