Anthropic essentially bans OpenClaw from Claude by making subscribers pay extra

Anthropic didn't cut OpenClaw's access because of a policy dispute; it cut it because the $200/mo Max plan was subsidizing $1,000–5,000/mo of compute per user, and that math only works if you control which tools consume it. First-party agents like Claude Code hit prompt cache hit rates that third-party invocations can't match, so platform enforcement isn't competitive maneuvering — it's cost accounting. This is the same pressure the NYT code overload piece reveals from the enterprise side: when production accelerates and verification costs spike, the economics force consolidation inward. The Glasswing launch made it explicit from the other direction — restricted access stops being a cost control mechanism and becomes the product itself. Every agent startup pricing at consumer scale now has a live falsification: per-task costs of $0.50–2.00 don't bend toward viability without an inference cost reduction nobody has a credible 12-month path to.