Anthropic Just Banned OpenClaw. Do This Now.
Everyone's scrambling for workarounds. I switched days ago. Here's what I use instead and why I saw this coming.
Three hits in one week.
March 31: Claude Code source leaks via npm. 500K lines of TypeScript out in the open. April 3: CVE-2026-21852, a critical vulnerability. April 4: Anthropic blocks all third-party harnesses from using Claude subscriptions.
Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code: “Our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools.”
Your $200/mo Max plan? It still works. But only for Claude Code. Try to pipe it through OpenClaw and you're paying per token now.
This is chess, not charity.
Pete Steinberger created OpenClaw. In February, he left to join OpenAI. Sam Altman posted publicly about it. OpenClaw is now effectively an OpenAI extension project.
Why would Anthropic subsidize a tool whose creator works for their biggest competitor? They wouldn't. And they didn't.
I don't blame them. I'm not on their board of directors. It's not my fight. Their subscription was built for personal coding on your own machine. Not for third-party harnesses. They said so.
Workarounds are a treadmill.
Within hours, Pete shipped a CLI method. Route through the local Claude binary instead of the API. People celebrated.
Anthropic closed it. The CLI path still counts as Extra Usage. You're paying per token either way. Others tried Antigravity OAuth, proxy routes, different wrappers. All of them are temporary.
If your entire setup depends on a workaround, you don't have a setup. You have a countdown.
The ban hit. I didn't flinch.
I was already off OpenClaw. Switched to Hermes just days ago. First tried local models. Didn't love them. Then I tested Hermes on MiniMax 2.7 on a whim.
It's been perfect. Cheap. Hardly any usage problems. For the things I need my agent to do, I honestly can't tell you there's a big difference between Opus 4.6 and MiniMax 2.7.
Everyone's fighting over who gets to pay $200/mo for one provider. I'm over here spending a fraction of that and getting the same work done.
Hermes gets better the more you use it.
Persistent memory
Remembers your preferences, your projects, your patterns across sessions. OpenClaw starts fresh every time.
Self-improving skills
After a complex task, Hermes writes a reusable skill. Next time the same problem shows up, it already knows the answer.
Model agnostic
MiniMax, Opus, Gemini, local models. Pick whatever works. You're never locked to one provider's pricing.
MiniMax 2.7 is all you need
I run Hermes on MiniMax 2.7 on my own machine. It's cheap, fast, and I honestly can't tell the difference from Opus for personal assistant work.
Runs on your computer
No $200/mo subscription. No cloud dependency. Hermes runs locally. Pair it with MiniMax and you're spending a fraction of what OpenClaw users pay.
Open source
Nous Research. MIT license. No one can ban you from using your own software on your own machine.
Stop renting your workflow.
If your entire agent setup depends on one company's goodwill, you're one policy change away from scrambling. That's what happened to everyone on April 4.
I still use Claude Code for coding. That's what it's for. But my autonomous agent, my chief of staff, the thing that runs my daily ops? That runs on Hermes. On a model I choose. At a price I control.
People post those memes about not being able to keep up. You have to keep up. It's not optional. But keeping up doesn't mean chasing workarounds. It means building on ground that doesn't shift under you.
The Agentic Arena.
The fight for how agents work, who controls them, and what they cost is happening right now. You don't want to be a spectator. You want to be in the arena.
Anthropic Mythos Revealed
Claude Mythos is the Anthropic model so good at finding security holes they refused to ship it. Here's what it can do, why it's locked down, and what it means for builders.
I Fired My OpenClaw Chief of Staff for Hermes
OpenClaw still has a job. Hermes took the top ops seat because it waits less, figures more out, and feels better when the work is live.
4 OpenClaw Mistakes That Waste Your Time (and How to Stop)
AI to optimize for optimization's sake. Not debugging your own agent. Copying everyone else's setup. No path to revenue. Here's how to fix all four.
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