There have been reports that simply having the string 'OpenClaw' in the Git history on Claude Code can result in usage restrictions or additional charges.



Reports are circulating on X (a Japanese online forum) that the AI coding support tool 'Claude Code' is rejecting requests or charging additional fees simply because the Git commit history contains the string 'OpenClaw'.




OpenClaw is a tool that claims to be a personal AI assistant that runs on the user's device. It is a tool in a similar area to Claude Code, which is an 'execution harness for using AI,' and discussions have been ongoing since April 2026 regarding the pricing structure for using Claude's models with third-party tools such as OpenClaw.

Anthropic notifies Claude Code users that additional fees will be required for the use of third-party tools such as OpenClaw - GIGAZINE



The incident began with a post on X by Theo, the founder of the AI chat service 'T3 Chat,' in which he explained that 'if OpenClaw is included as a JSON fragment in a recent commit, Claude Code will either reject the request or charge an additional fee.' According to Theo, the repository used for verification was empty, and he was simply calling Claude Code directly.

The same topic was widely covered on Hacker News , a news posting site for engineers. User abdullin reported that when he created a Git repository in an empty temporary directory, included the JSON string '{'schema': 'openclaw.inbound_meta.v1'}' in the commit message, and then sent only 'claude -p 'hi'' to Claude Code, his connection was immediately disconnected and session usage jumped to 100%.

The important point is that the user wasn't actually running OpenClaw, and the prompt to Claude Code was simply 'hi'. Hacker News points out that the string 'OpenClaw' appears in the Git history rather than the prompt, suggesting that Claude Code reads the Git history and uses it as a basis for its decision.



Another user, jrflo, was having Claude edit a blog post that mentioned OpenClaw when Claude responded, 'Isn't OpenClaw a typo or a joke?' When jrflo provided a link to the official OpenClaw website, the chat ended immediately, and jrflo reports that the 5-hour usage limit had been reached. While jrflo acknowledges the possibility of it being a coincidence, he says it seems unusual considering the normal, light usage.

Hacker News even posted a sarcastic comment stating that 'simply including the string 'OpenClaw' in a single commit message can prevent pull requests for Claude Code from being submitted to open-source repositories.'

On the other hand, some argued that Anthropic also had its reasons, as always-on agents like OpenClaw may be generating a load that exceeds the expectations for subscription billing. However, it has also been pointed out that the measures taken in this case are 'damaging the brand image.'

As of the time of writing, Anthropic, the company behind Claude Code, has not provided a detailed technical explanation, and what happened internally remains a mystery.

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in AI, Posted by log1d_ts