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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

> The irony of course is that the way they've gone about reacting to this has damaged their brand so badly at the trust level that the public view of their company has completely flipped.

No one at my company gives a single shit about Openclaw, so this whole situation has been a noop for a lot more of the public than you seem to think.

Also, "censorship"? How is disallowing a specific tool that abuses a subscription "censorship"?

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No one at my company cares about OpenClaw either. We do care that we can be billed unexpectedly (either usage quota immediately being consumed, or being charged additional costs), generally with zero recourse, because a particular set of characters that Anthropic doesn't like appears somewhere in a repo.

This week the characters are "OpenClaw". I won't even try to guess what might lead to erroneous billing next week.

I think the disallowing usage part was a great idea. I'd rather that Claude works well without getting DDOS'd. But merely mentioning OpenClaw causing session termination and extra charges? That's censorship. Also pretending not to know what OpenClaw is.

It's all just very weird and creepy.

'censorship' may be too strong a word, but there is something unprecedented about this. AI tools are supposed to be general-purpose and able to assist with all sorts of tasks. It's expected that they are restricted when it comes to "unsafe" content like illegal or nsfw information and activities. However, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI tool has been restricted from assisting with something that's perceived as a threat to the AI company.

> this is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI tool has been restricted from assisting with something that's perceived as a threat to the AI company

You think so? I was under the impression that all the model providers have been trying to prevent use of their models to train competitor models for a while now.

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