A more reasonable long term option for Anthropic is to create a throttling protocol
A standardized harness agnostic protocol for model providers to send warnings and throttle usage in real time
Harnesses would implement the protocol. A client can be warned. If it doesn’t listen, it can be temporarily blocked from the server side, or banned permanently if it breaks the rules too many times
Needless to say, throttling could be done first on server side easily. That would actually fix the load issue for them in the short run, while not banning the user and just giving a bad delayed UX. They probably already do this to prevent abuse
The suggested protocol would then save the user from abuse related delays too, and also inform the harness developer when they do something wrong
If your Claude subscription renewed too recently and you don't wanna waste those tokens, you can still use your Claude sub in your OpenClaw account through ACP (which uses Claude Agents SDK, which poses no risk)
Steps:
- Open Claude Code (not OpenClaw)
- Tell it to set default model to something other than Claude (e.g. openai-codex/gpt-5.4) and tell it to delete the saved Anthropic credentials in OpenClaw config
- Create a topic in telegram or channel in discord called claude. Copy the id of that channel
- Give the link below together with the channel/topic id, and tell it to bind that channel to claude using ACP channel binding
- Restart
You should now be able to talk to Claude through Claude Agents SDK in that channel. You might need to iterate a couple times until Claude gets the config right
It will be very bare functionality, and it will not have the features and tools that your main OpenClaw harness has. It will be shitty. But you can still use telegram/discord with your subscription in the rest of the month, if you are used to the setup
https://t.co/Z0RiJbke5V
A little insight that might save you a lot of future headache if your work involves storing agent sessions and you want to be interoperable/drop-in replace alternative harnesses
@zeddotdev already did the hard work of creating an interoperable standard, ACP: Agent Client Protocol
You can represent an agent session as JSON lines of the ACP message stream
You can construct the current state of the harness from this stream. This is already how Zed loads a session I believe
If you are building an AI product, and you don't want to be locked into a single company or harness, building with ACP in mind would be a smart thing to do
Here is how acpx stores ACP sessions in ~/.acpx folder, it does exactly that:
https://t.co/SVhwXWbrBY
But don't build anything on the acpx schema for now, because I might change it in the future
Just know that JSONL of ACP messages is a good candidate for a somewhat-lossy single source of truth for agent sessions
Lossy because ACP adapters for harnesses might not transfer all the thinking and tools done by the model
So continuing or restoring a session with full fidelity is still not possible if you only save the ACP session. You still need to store original harness session files as well
But for rendering a past session for viewing or reconstructing a lossy version of it, it should be more than enough
Consider ACP if the benefits of not locking yourself in to a specific ecosystem outweighs these minor issues
If you dislike rotating ack emojis on your messages in openclaw, this is how to make sure it only puts one emoji on your message
Multiple emojis are annoying esp when you have discord notifications enabled on your phone