Anthropic blocks OpenClaw’s founder from accessing Claude AI, reverses decision in hours

Anthropic banned the founder of AI agent platform OpenClaw temporarily before reinstating his account. Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, on Friday said that his Claude account had been suspended while sharing an image of the email he received from Anthropic over the account being inaccessible due to ‘suspicious’ activity.

“An internal investigation of suspicious signals associated with your account indicates a violation of our Usage Policy. As a result, we have revoked your access to Claude,” read the email from Anthropic shared by Steinberger.

“Yeah folks, it’s gonna be harder in the future to ensure OpenClaw still works with Anthropic models,” Steinberger noted in the post.

However, the ban didn’t last long, with Steinberger posting just a few hours later, “My account got reinstated. Thanks, folks!”

Why did Anthropic ban OpenClaw creator?

Anthropic has not officially revealed the reason for the suspension of Steinberger’s account. However, the OpenClaw creator did give some hint on what may have gotten him in trouble with the Claude maker.

Steinberger said in response to a post that he has been working on getting a Claude feature working with OpenClaw, which seems to have gotten him banned.

“I’ve been working on getting the claude -p fallback feature working after Boris confirmed that it’s a classifier bug and not intentional. We’re still blocked and it seems that got me banned too,” said Steinberger.

Notably, Anthropic had earlier this week announced that it was banning third-party AI agent platforms like OpenClaw from using Claude due to the enormous infrastructure strain caused by the platform.

Steinberger had developed OpenClaw via vibe coding and had initially named it Clawdbot until he received a nudge from Anthropic to change the name due to similarity with the popular AI chatbot. The name later stuck as OpenClaw, and the platform gained mass acceptance earlier this year as users tried the AI agent platform.

Unlike usual chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, OpenClaw allows users to interact with it from their favourite platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, iMessage, Signal, and Microsoft Teams. The platform also allows users to receive summaries, reminders, or briefings via its AI.

The popularity of OpenClaw led to Steinberger getting hired by OpenAI to lead ‘next-generation personal AI agents’. However, he continues to work on improving OpenClaw and is often seen taking inputs from users on X on how to improve the performance of the platform.

Asked why he still continues to use Claude models while working for OpenAI, Steinberger responded to a post, “You need to separate two things. My work at the OpenClaw Foundation, where we wanna make OpenClaw work great for any model provider, and my job at OpenAI to help them with future product strategy.”