OpenClaw Founder Responds to Claude CLI "Unban" Rumors: Verbally Allowed but Still Blocked in Practice

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According to Beating Monitoring, someone posted a screenshot of the sentence “Anthropic allows OpenClaw-style Claude CLI usage” from the latest OpenClaw documentation on Hacker News, and the post was featured on the front page, then shared on X. OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger responded on both platforms, providing the clearest version so far: verbal permission is real, but actual blocking is also real.

According to Steinberger, Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, previously publicly stated on X that CLI usage was permitted. Based on this, OpenClaw re-enabled support and turned off high token-consuming features like heartbeat by default. However, testing by the team showed that Anthropic’s server still blocks OpenClaw’s system prompt snippets, and calls are still rejected. He added that a few renames could bypass the classifier, but he doesn’t want to play this cat-and-mouse game.

OpenClaw connects to Claude Code, which fundamentally involves calling claude -p, the official Claude CLI in a one-time non-interactive mode, with no separate channel to bypass it; whether using an API key or Pro / Max / Team subscription depends on which account was logged into the local Claude CLI at the time. This round of “blocking OpenClaw” by Anthropic is not about banning the claude -p command itself but identifying OpenClaw on the server side through fingerprint recognition and rejecting it when matched. Boris’s verbal “CLI is allowed” and the statement in the documentation about “reusing claude -p by default” refer to the same thing; the only difference with subscription limits is whether a classifier is allowed or not.

OpenClaw removed Claude CLI from the default onboarding for new users in v2026.4.5, but re-added it two days later in v2026.4.7, along with a batch of environment variable cleanups and permission restrictions for the Claude CLI runtime environment. The “re-allowed” mentioned in this documentation corresponds to the changes made in v2026.4.7.

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