Cloud support for OpenClaw is officially dead: Anthropic is ending Claude subscription coverage inside third‑party harnesses, and they explicitly called out OpenClaw. I’m way more interested in this from an engineering standpoint than the rage cycle, because the core issue is workload shape and capacity management. The subscription product is heavily subsidized versus API pricing (people have cited $200/month translating to thousands in equivalent API compute), and that subsidy only works when Anthropic can optimize and cache the request patterns they expect inside their own Claude Code harness. The technical crux is prompt caching. Third‑party harnesses can break caching behavior, which forces more real compute per token even if the user thinks they’re “using what they paid for.” That’s why Anthropic is drawing a hard line: keep subscription usage inside their products, and use API keys everywhere else. Separately, I call out what looks like a pretty bad comms response to people burning through limits faster—recommendations like “start fresh after idle,” “cap to 200k tokens,” and “use Sonnet 4.6 instead of Opus” are basically admissions that cache misses and session patterns matter a lot. The bigger macro takeaway: the free lunch is ending—expect tighter limits, fewer subsidized tokens, and pricing pressure across labs as demand outpaces supply.