This is draconian.
> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product. I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.
Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?
Considering the tremendous amount of tokens OpenClaw can burn for something that has nothing to do with sofware development, I think it's reasonable for Google to not allow using tokens reserved for Antigravity. I don't think there's such a restriction if you pay for the API out of pocket.
> Isn't the reason companies are doing this because they're offering tokens at a discount, provided they're spent through their tooling?
Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?
Google decided on their own business plan without any guns to their backs. If they decide to create a plan that is subsidized that's entirely on them.
So the issue is the same as Anthropic. They do charge for it though their API. The users, however, want to use the discounted "unlimited" flat rate through the first-party app instead, then get mad when they are told they have to use the same API every other third-party app does.
No, the problem is that the discounted rate exists in the first place. Essentially these are unfair business practices, product cross subsidization to ensure market dominance. See also: Microsoft and a whole bunch of other companies.
And once they've got their monopoly position there is inevitably the rug-pull. I wonder if some CPO somewhere actually had the guts to put a 'rug pull' item on the product roadmap.
It's not unfair its how every business works. When your product is new or not yet good enough and you want people to try it you give them discounts, or if you want to drive traffic to your service you also do the same.
Even traditional businesses do this with coupons. Is it unfair that Costco sells chickens for under cost because it drives usage to them?
Companies like Uber did use massive funding and price subsidization to try and kill competition and then take a monopoly, but it is hard to assert that this is what google is doing now. And given that other competitors in the space, Anthropic are doing the exact same thing again its not as though they are alone.
Also they could be subsidizing it because they want that usage type as it helps them train models better.
Chatgpt and gpt4 were all ran at a loss and subsidized people just didn't know that. Almost all of the llm companies have been selling 1 dollar of llm compute for 50 cents as they valued the usage, training data, and users more than making profit now.
This next generation of MOE and other newly trained models. Like opus 4.6, Cursor Composer 1.5, gpt 5.3 codex, and many of the others have been the first models where these companies are actually profitably serving the tokens at the api cost.
This year has been the switch where ai companies are actually thinking of becoming profitable instead of just focusing on research and development.
> It's not unfair its how every business works.
Not. On both counts.
I'd agree with you if this was some new SaaS just opening its doors.
But Google are banning entire accounts, with years, even decades, of personal history, photos, even phone accounts and app development projects.
They very easily could just negate the anti-gravity access, which would be much, much more reasonable.
>But Google are banning entire accounts, with years, even decades, of personal history, photos, even phone accounts and app development projects.
Source? It seems to me only the anti-gravity access was blocked. The link says
> Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service.
> there’s no way we can restore our accounts to use Antigravity anymore yeah?
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
Hmm, you might be right. I'm reading the forum thread linked in the OP.
> ”Thank you for your continued patience as we have thoroughly investigated your account access issue. Please be assured that we conducted a comprehensive investigation, exploring every possible avenue to restore your access.
> Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product.
> I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.”
I totally read that (and the other posts in that forum) as a complete suspension of their whole Google Account (another person mentions their GCP access suspended).
But I could be reading it wrong and it's just their AI account (and any service that uses that... I'm not clear on where those boundaries are?)
Still not going to risk signing up for this, because I cannot risk my Google account getting suspended or banned for something I wasn't aware of in the ToS. No warnings is still drastic, even if it's just part of the account.
>This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
That sounds like the suspension only affects those things. Not e.g. gmail.
> Essentially these are unfair business practices, product cross subsidization to ensure market dominance.
Offering a different discounted rate for a service, though their first-party platform is not an unfair business practice whatsoever, though. The bar isn't what you disagree with, or what you think their motives are without any substantial proof. They could even make a honest argument that they can aggressively key-value cache default prompts from their own software reducing inference costs.
>See also: Microsoft and a whole bunch of other companies.
What does that have to do with Google?
Offering goods or services below the cost of their production is often illegal, though. It's called "dumping".
Although in this case it's probably impossible to define, given the complexity of calculating the true cost of tokens.
And in this case the subsidy is paid for by tied sales from other users that don't actually use the service, which is another illegal business practice.
So cable bundling channels is also “illegal” according to you? Since I don’t watch sports?
There certainly are jurisdictions where tv providers are legally required to offer channels a la carte.
Not in the US…
And not typically channels that can survive independently
Sure, but we're generally talking here about companies that don't operate only in the US. :)
e.g. the CRTC has regulations around a la carte offerings since the past decade: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/television/program/alacarte.htm
> TV service providers must offer channels both individually and in packages of up to 10 channels.
What are you talking about? Where is this illegal? It’s common to sell subscription services and then price them according to expected usage blended across the user base.
Tying is typically perfectly legal in both the EU and the US.
This isn’t even vaguely similar to illegal tying. The biggest problem being that the products almost certainly aren’t dissimilar enough to be considered “tied” at all.
This obviously cannot be true, otherwise Costco would have been sued to oblivion for “dumping” their rotisserie chickens.
Costco gets to sidestep a lot of regulations because they technically are a private club with paid membership. The US anti-monopoly laws are also unusually weak.
In other countries, selling a $7 chicken if it's subsidized by the sale of other goods can indeed be illegal.
Do you have some countries in mind where that's illegal?
That would most likely be illegal in Finland. You're not allowed predatory pricing. And the same is true for the EU as a whole, although you may have to be operating in an international market, not just a local one. See Abuse of dominance in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_102_of_the_Treaty_on_t...
The US, the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits predatory pricing.
So if I could charge less for chicken because I use that as a doorbuster to get you inside the store, but I charge more for other items, that is predatory pricing and against US law?
In Germany, selling goods for less then the one bought them for can be illegal if its used to push competition out on a large scale.
If you now acknowledge there is a carve out… couldn’t there be two carve outs? Or more?
It seems like you havent thought this through at all.
Forget about Costco, if some people here are so convinced this behavior is illegal they should be going after every fast food company that offers anything like "get a free/cheap xyz with any drink purchase!" Where the subsidy is obvious.
> Offering goods or services below the cost of their production is often illegal, though. It's called "dumping"
No.
Dumping is an international-trade term. It doesn’t even require pricing below cost, just aiming “to increase market share in a foreign market by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation where the exporter will be able to unilaterally dictate price and quality of the product” [1].
Loss leaders are common in commerce and entirely legal, as are free trials. I struggle to think of a competent jurisdiction that bans them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
I'm sorry, my fault. I studied economics in Russia, and the term "dumping" was used in a more general sense as "selling goods or services below their cost".
Russian laws officially use the term "monopolistically low prices", and prohibit them if the entity engaging in such pricing holds a dominating presence in the market (and not necessarily for the goods that are being underpriced).
A correct term for the US is "predatory pricing", and it's also prohibited by the Sherman Act. For much the same reason, a large entity can destroy competition by accepting losses from selling goods below the cost. The border between loss leaders and predatory pricing is, as usual, very blurred.
> I studied economics in Russia, and the term "dumping" was used in a more general sense as "selling goods or services below their cost"
Oooh! Do you have a recommendation for a translation of a Russian economics text? I’m particularly curious of Soviet-era texts that work on theory without prices.
> correct term for the US is "predatory pricing", and it's also prohibited by the Sherman Act
Sherman prohibits the “restraint of trade or commerce” [1]. The word “price” never appears in its text. In practice, predatory pricing is a tightly-regulated term that doesn’t generally prohibit selling goods below cost
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-3055/pdf/COMPS-305...
> Oooh! Do you have a recommendation for a translation of a Russian economics text? I’m particularly curious of Soviet-era texts that work on theory without prices.
I don't think they exist? The Soviet Union used prices internally as an accounting tool. It essentially had two separate currencies: the actual physical currency that regular people owned and the virtual "accounting" currency. The accounting currency could not be converted into the real one, except for salary payments that were tightly regulated.
Once the USSR allowed some inter-conversion channels in the early 80-s its economy predictably got blown up as a result.
> Sherman prohibits the “restraint of trade or commerce” [1]. The word “price” never appears in its text. In practice, predatory pricing is a tightly-regulated term that doesn’t generally prohibit selling goods below cost
The Sherman Act is a framing law that establishes the authority to regulate monopolies, and it's on purpose rather vague in its wording.
A more concrete law here is the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits illegal price discrimination, including pricing substantially similar goods differently for different purchasers.
They also had 'hard' money and a fictive exchange rate between the 'hard' (Western) currencies and the internal one. And a whole machine dedicated to obtaining as much of this hard money as possible without returning anything of real value for it.
So every company that is not immediately selling enough to cover its fixed costs and its variable cost should be illegal? Every company and every new initiative must be profitable from day one in your world?
If it's a large company, that can dominate the market by absorbing the losses until competition disappears?
Arguably, yes.
So that means for instance it was illegal for Netflix to get into the streaming business or for Apple to start selling iPods because neither could do it profitably from day one?
Should Microsoft have not been allowed to sell operating systems and still survive from selling BASIC interpreters? Should Nintendo have not been allowed to sell video games and still be selling playing cards?
Every company that is interested in survival takes profits from an existing business to start a new one,
The question is over what timescale and volume.
Toyota shouldn't have to sell their first new car off the line for 100 million to pay for the entire manufacturing line.
Your first SAAS customer shouldn't have to pay back all your costs.
Can you plan to break even after your first month of sales? first year? 10 years?
So we are going to pass a law that any new company initiative must be profitable in $x years? Are we going to outlaw loss leaders?
This isn't typically an area where laws and regulations can work effectively because who knows until after the fact? Taxation laws do deal with this from a different perspective, for example most jurisdictions won't let a company take losses every year forever, as they judge the intent of a corporation. Even this is incredibly complex so I'm not sure how your idea would work, even the term "break even" doesn't have a clear definition, ex: do Capital assets still depreciate the same in the AI world? When did Amazon start to break even? What if they didn't deliver shopping on top of aws? Was that an unfair subsidization?
Amazon doesn’t for the most part deliver shopping on top of AWS.
Amazon runs two sets of infrastructure “CDO” and “AWS”. It’s a myth that Amazon used excess capacity to start AWS. AWS was always built out as separate infrastructure outside of AWS.
Some Amazon services do run on AWS. But when Amazon runs workloads on AWS, for internal accounting, they are considered a customer.
Source: former employee at AWS
So it would be illegal for Google but legal for Anthropic?
What about OpenAI?
First of all, I doubt they’re losing money in inference. Even across subscriptions. This is a tired argument that has been repeated so many times on HN.
Second, that’s not what dumping means. It’s a specific term for international trade.
Third, it’s not illegal to sell something for below the cost to make it. That’s another common misunderstanding.
They give over 300k USD of free credits as part of the startup program without any commitment required...
"PAYGO API access" vs "Monthly Tool Subscription" is just a matter of different unit economics; there's nothing particularly unusual or strange about the idea on its own, specific claims against Google notwithstanding.
Of course, Google is still in the wrong here for instantly nuking the account instead of just billing them for API usage instead (largely because an autoban or whatever easier, I'm sure).
I doubt they would have the ability to charge them for it. They never signed up for api token usage?
The ban hammer is the scary part.
I am afraid of using any Google services in experimental way from the fear that my whole Google existence will be banned.
I think blocking access temporarily with a warning would be much more suitable. Unblocking could be even conditioned on a request to pay for the abused tokens
Just because all you can eat buffet exists doesn't mean that the food is free or you can take away the food. The food exists in discounted rate only if you consider it unlimited food. For normal folks they make profit.
Claude code could possibly make profit because the average usage doesn't come close to exhausting the limits.
This exactly. I'm using 10% of my max plan on the weeks that I'm working a lot. Hit a 4-hour limit once over few months and never let it run overnight. And I'm very happy with my subscription
So you are saying a company should never reinvest profits in the company to support another money losing business until it’s profitable?
Should Netflix for instance not invested money from renting DVDs to invest in a streaming service?
Apple not use the profits it was making from selling Apple //e’s to create the Mac?
Subsidizing the cost of developing a product isn't necessarily bad, but predatory pricing that prohibits competition would be.
Not sure that this case is either. This is just idiots breaking the TOS.
So exactly what’s the difference between “predatory pricing” and pricing to gain customers and market share? Should Sony have to sell the first PlayStation off the line at $2000 (making up a number) so it can sell it at a marginal profit from day one or should it sell it below cost knowing that that over its lifetime if it stays at that price, it will both gain customers and sell at a profit in year 4 as the price of technology comes down and it gets economies of scale?
The EU uses an effects-based model. If below-cost prices are driving other actors out of business or has other anti-competitive effects, it is predatory pricing.
Reason #1642 that the technology industry in the EU sucks…
This is not it. This is reason #1 that the tech industry in the US is so dystopian.
I’m sure that developers who work for boring old enterprises who make twice as much their EU counterparts would disagree. Let alone those working at BigTech and adjacent.
> So you are saying a company should never reinvest profits in the company to support another money losing business until it’s profitable?
If it makes it impossible to set up a competitor? Absolutely, yes.
> Should Netflix for instance not invested money from renting DVDs to invest in a streaming service?
Netflix was not priced below the cost of production from the beginning. You're confusing sustainable pricing and paying off all the capital spending immediately at launch.
A better example is Doordash when it was heavily subsidized by VC money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 And it now faces several anti-trust lawsuits.
Netflix very much was priced below the cost of production for years and had to borrow money to make Netflix originals.
I'm not familiar with their originals economics, but the original streaming Netflix was not priced below the cost. As evidenced by them keeping the same subscription cost for years.
How is that “evidence” of anything? The “evidence” that they were charging less for subscriptions than it cost to run the streaming service is that they were borrowing billions of dollars to both license content and create new content over the course of years.
Netflix borrowed $16 billion over a decades
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/business/netflix-earnings...
Because subscriptions didn’t make enough money to fund its business. Were they being “anti competitive”?
Yes. They were. The US just hasn't enforced antitrust laws in decades.
So now a business shouldn’t be able to borrow money either to start a new initiative? Should they have instead charged customers enough from day one to fund growth? So the first 1000 or so customers should have been charged enough so they could spend an extra $16 Billion?
If they're using their overwhelming size to lock out smaller competitors that can't put up a similar collateral?
Probably a good idea. And it looks like Netflix simply needed to make the service a bit more expensive?
A “bit” more expensive to cover $16 billion of expenses?
So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing? Were they going to charge their first 10,000 customers $100,000 a year so they could fund development without either borrowing money or take it from existing businesses?
Yes? Netflix had 20 million subscribers in 2010. At additional $50 per year per subscriber, that's $1B a year. More than enough to be profitable with regular loan financing at market rates.
> So how would that have helped smaller competitors? Where were they going to get the money from to compete if not other lines of businesses or borrowing?
By borrowing at market rates and pricing services to cover the loan payments.
You're actually making a good argument why cross-financing should not exist at all and that we all would probably be better without it.
You just said that Netflix shouldn’t borrow money because it was anti competitive
And I can’t believe that this conversation just went to companies should borrow money instead of reinvesting its own profits. Really?
No, I'm saying that using Netflix cross-financing to borrow money to operate below cost is anti-competitive. Not borrowing in general.
Its called economies of scale. When they server 200000 ai subscriptions they dont expect everyone to use the max. They expect some will use more and some will use less and at the end of the day it will even out. Thats how every service works that is for the masses. As soon as you want a guaranteed 1000 tokens you should pay for that.
If I pay for a subscription that guarantees 1000 tokens, I am paying for guaranteed 1000 tokens.
No, it's more like stuffing your pockets in all-you-can-eat buffet
There's nothing wrong or illegal with subsidizing products and that's not what Microsoft or others have gotten in trouble for doing. It's when they tie a strong monopolistic position (Windows) with bundling to prevent competition (Internet explorer). This is how Apple has operated with far tighter bundling and cross collateralization of their ecosystem without facing monopoly allegations. Google does not have a monopoly position in AI.
However someone else said this, and I agree, if I have an AI use my claude-code CLI how is not valid first-party app use? It would be different if they would disallow others to use your claude-code account, and I think most including these AI companies would argue AI is supposed to replace and augment humans. So they aren't banning AI's from using the CLI, right- though thats what some of them are seemingly wanting to do.
Yep it sounds like Google is charging too little, and taking losses that would be unsustainable for other companies, to try and win the market on AI coding products. Which is a violation of anti trust law, I think. Now that people are using their pricing in an unexpected way where their product isn’t the one winning from their anti competitive practices, they’re punishing the users. Classic monopolistic behavior. And why we need to tax mega corp more and break them up.
Google wants usage that earns them street cred, not usage from bots who will never evaluate the output. They're all fighting tooth and nail to acquire customers, both free and paid... they didn't want their giveaways to be burned.
But banning accounts wholesale is not going to earn them more customers. They could have just disabled Gemini access, or even given a warning first.
I don't use OpenClaw, I do pay hundreds per month for AI subscriptions, and I will not be giving that money to Google while they treat their customers like this.
> They could have just disabled Gemini access
Yes, please!
Hah, yeah, I'm seriously considering downgrading my Google Home Premium subscription to avoid the Gemini features on my Nest cameras.
> But banning accounts wholesale is not going to earn them more customers.
it has the chilling effect - people getting banned by google might imagine their entire google account getting banned (whether that's true or not is irrelevant).
> They could have just disabled Gemini access
They just disabled Antigravity access.
So they ban a group of early adopters who picked their product and who shape opinions.
They're about to find out that if you aim to wholesale replace your workers with AI you can't really complain if your users replace themselves with AI...
If I say “you can use my car for $250/month if you don’t smoke in it” and then you pay me that money and you drive around until one day you smoke in it, I’m not going to let you smoke in my car. I told you not to smoke in it and you smoked in it. That’s the deal. All seems fine to me tbh.
I think it's a bad analogy. For one - smoking does very high permanent damage to a car interior.
Two - the usage pattern was Shaun's toc but not obviously against the spirit.
More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want" And then going: Obviously I didn't mean driving to another coast on a highway
More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want so long as you don't drive to another coast on a highway" and then you drive to another coast on a highway and get mad when I won't give you my car next time.
No, it’s more like you have 10k km to drive in this car.
And then, after you actually drive it for 10k km on “unauthorized” highways, they ban you.
That’s why analogies are for fucking idiots. There is a true example — you bought access to use your account for n tokens, and google got pissy that you didn’t use the tokens in their spyware ecosystem.
For you analogy loving fucks, it’s like the arcades selling their proprietary 50 cent worth token coins, that only works on their machines, when they could just accept 50 cent coins.
Well, your premise is false because you do not actually buy access for a stated number of tokens. I used the analogy because you have trouble getting facts straight so indeed you fall into the category that you describe there.
They’re not banning for excessive use. They’re banning for use with unauthorized software. Big difference.
> Then maybe they should charge for that instead of banning accounts?
They do, though - you're free to buy tokens and use Google's AI/LLM via the API?
What OpenClaw was doing was pretending to be a different product (Anti gravity) in order to use the cheaper tier.
Then it should be “This is your first and final warning. The next time we catch you, it’s a ban.”. People are building their lives around this stuff and kneejerk bans erode good faith in your platform.
> Then it should be “This is your first and final warning. The next time we catch you, it’s a ban.”. People are building their lives around this stuff and kneejerk bans erode good faith in your platform.
This is actually the soft-touch approach: the users of these vibe-coded products need to understand that they are delegating their authority to the tool to work on their behalf.
In this case, they delegated to a tool that broke the ToS. The result could have been a lot worse, and in return they learned that the tool is acting with their full authority.
-----------------
EDIT:
One of the users got this response from google support:
> Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
Their decision? To break ToS on some other provider:
> I guess it is time to move on to Codex or Claude Code.
So, yeah, perhaps the users really are too stupid to understand what's going on, and even this soft-touch approach has done nothing to clue them in.
Except it's expressly NOT against the TOS of codex to use it via oAuth with Openclaw (the jury is currently out re Anthropic)
The difference is ChatGPT Pro/Plus plans have one shared pool of token limits shared across all use cases.
In contrast Google's AI plans give you at least three seperate pools of token usage limits: Gemini App + Antigravity/Other Code Assist tools like Android Studio + AI Studio free usage limits.
Google limit the context of where you can use their tokens but in exchange they give you substantially more.
Given how popular OpenClaw is (and that OpenClaw itself supports antigravity), I think it's shortsighted to not publicly state that it's not allowed and to warn users. Permanently banning people from Antigravity (much like any Google product) feels really harsh.
I agree. As others have mentioned here, the authenticate with AntiGravity web popup clearly says that this authentication is only to be used with Google products.
How can Claws users miss this?
What Google could have done better: obviously implement rate throttling on API calls authenticated through the Gemini AI Pro $20/month accounts. (I thought they did this, buy apparently not?) Google tries hard to get people to get API keys, which is what I do, and there seems to be a very large free tier on API calls before my credit card gets hit every month.
Can I at least log in one last time and download my gmail messages from 2004?
Oh man.
What a wonderful way to stop people from using your LLM.
All these AI companies trying to get everyone to be locked into their toolchains is just hilariously short sighted. Particularly for dev tools. It's the sure path to get devs to hate your product.
And for what? The devs are already paying a pretty penny to use your LLM. Why do you also need to force them to using your toolkit?
I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones.
Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
> But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
It's absurd, there's people out there paying $200 for the equivalent of $1600 in API credits. Of course there's a catch! What did you expect!
https://bsky.app/profile/borum.dev/post/3meynioealc2x
That tool is "ccusage" if you're a Claude subscriber and want to see what the damage will be if/when Anthropic decides to pull the rug.
its 200 to 6000 and I use the 6000. I also use an antigravity subscription for probably another 6k (I don’t use them fully tho,)
I cant believe this is net positive for them.
You are being subsidised to the tune of 50 to 99.9 cents on the dollar compared to the API.
What the hell do you expect? To get paid for using other people's tools on Google's servers?
Businesses do not have an entitlement to profit. Suspending customers for using a fairly expensive subscription plan -- especially forfeiting an annual prepayment for a day or two of coloring outside the lines -- sure does make Google appear entitled to profit without ever risking its own pricing model.
> Suspending customers for using a fairly expensive subscription plan -- especially forfeiting an annual prepayment for a day or two of coloring outside the lines
they're being suspended for using a private api outside of the app for which the api was intended. If you make a clone of the hbo app, so that you can watch hbo shows without ads by logging in with your discounted ads-included membership, your account will also be suspended.
The facts are straightforward, even without analogies. But since we're using them...
You are at the grocery store, checking out. The total comes to $250. You pay, but then remember you had a coupon. You present it to the cashier, who calls the manager over. The manager informed you that you've attempted to use an expired coupon, which is a violation of Paragraph 53 subsection d of their Terms of Service. They keep your groceries and your $250, and they ban you from the store.
Google is acting here like it was entitled to a profitable transaction, and is even entitled to punish anyone who tries to make it a losing transaction. But they're not the police. No crime was committed.
Regular businesses win some and lose some. A store buys widgets for $10 and hopes to sell them for $20, but sometimes they miscalculate and have to unload them for $5. Overall they hope their winners exceed their losers. That's business.
my point wasn't an analogy. the facts are that it is a private api being used with a subscription service. neither hbo nor google are required to do business with people that abuse the api.
We are in violent agreement about that point. Where we seem to disagree is that I don't think they're entitled to also keep the customer's annual subscription payment when they've decided they want out of the contract.
I think they could make a good case for a prorated refund in either small claims or as a class action.
What happens if the customer ask his credit card company to do a chargeback?
> What happens if the customer ask his credit card company to do a chargeback?
Then google will presumably perma-ban that user (and all accounts for that user) across all its services (gmail, etc).
> They keep your groceries and your $250, and they ban you from the store.
If you signed an agreement with the grocery store that says they will ban you with no refunds for doing $FOO, and you do $FOO, then you can't expect any sympathy when you get banned, now can you?
In any case, your analogy is broken, because this is a monthly subscription, not a once-off purchase: when you pay for a month of subscription and then get banned, you don't expect to get that month's payment back.
At least one person in the support thread paid for a year and appears to have had it all forfeited, not refunded. If you're OK with that, then I urge you to reconsider. There is a big difference between contract, civil, and criminal law. People who break contracts aren't criminals. Sprawling corporations do not need yet more power, beyond the might they already have, to act like private police forces.
A purchase transaction is a different thing from a subscription. It would be a more meaningful comparison if your example happened at Costco where you need a membership to shop. You'd get either your groceries or your $250 back, but you'd be banned from the store and you wouldn't get your membership fee refunded.
Equally, customers are not entitled to make set the terms, or pricing decisions for businesses. They can always move their custom elsewhere if they disagree with ToS or pricing.
Of course. That's why I personally don't use an ad blocker. I just close the tab if it's too annoying.
> Suspending customers for [snipped]
They are being banned (not suspended) for breaking the ToS, not for what you imagine them to be suspended for.
It doesn't matter how expensive a provider plan you purchase, the provider is free to end their contract with you, permanently if they want to, if you breach their terms of service.
You also get the same freedom.
The issue is that Google apparently keeps charging the subscription despite the ban, so is not ending the contract in that sense.
There is a reality that when they control the client it can be significantly cheaper for them to run: the Claude code creator has mentioned that the client was carefully designed to maximise prompt caching. If you use a different client, your usage patterns can be different and it may cost them significantly more to serve you.
This isn't a sudden change, either: they were always up-front that subscriptions are for their own clients/apps, and API is for external clients. They don't document the internal client API/auth (people extracted it).
I think a more valid complaint might be "The API costs too much" if you prefer alternative clients. But all providers are quite short on compute at the moment from what I hear, and they're likely prioritising what they subsidise.
It reminds me of the net neutrality debate from a decade ago. I'm not American but I remember the discord and online hate towards Ajit Pai when they were repealing it.
On one side you had the argument that repealing net neutrality would mean you can save money on your internet bill by only paying for access to what you use. On the other, you had the argument that it would just enable companies to milk you for even more profit and throttle your connection as they see fit.
IMO we need 'net neutrality' for LLM clients. I feel like AI companies are hypocrites for talking about safety all the time, but want us to only use their LLMs in the way they intend. They're saying we're all going to be replaced by AI in 12 months, and we have to use their tools to survive, right?
Yann LeCun recently warned that the AI coming out of China is trending towards being more open than the American alternative. If it continues like this, I can see programmers being pushed towards Chinese models. Is that what the US government wants?
Use of Chinese models: If I had not got a discount for signing up for a full year of Gemini AI Pro for something like $14/month, I might have started just using a Chinese chat model for things where privacy is not an issue. Ironic that I am now paying for both Gemini AI Plus and also $20/month for Ollama Cloud (as a super easy way to experiment with many open models). I am also paying Proton $10/month to use their handy lumo+ private chat service built on Mistral models. I feel like I am spending too much money but I don’t want to feel locked into just a few vendors, and to be honest it is fun having alternatives. A year ago I used APIs for Chinese models (and Mistral in France) and the cost was really low.
The devs are paying to use the UIs provided by the company. The usage-based API is a separate offering, and everyone knows that.
It's okay to be annoyed at being caught, but honestly the deer in the headlights bit is a bit ridiculous.
If you want to use an API, pay for the API option. Or run your own models.
Google has been particularly pernicious in the corporate exercise of zero-tolerance.
Because of their large footprint in so many areas, it is wise to greatly (re)consider expansion in the ways that you rely on them.
Hopefully this gets people to stop using Google for more than just LLMs.
The tool thing is kind of infuriating at the moment. I've been using Claude on the command line so I can use my subscription. It's fine, but it also feels kind of silly, like I'm looking at ccusage and it seems like I'm using way more $ in tokens than I'm paying for with the subscription. Which is a win for me, but, I don't really feel like Claude Code is such a compelling product that it's going to keep me locked in to their model, so I don't know why they're creating such a steep discount to get me to use it. I'm perfectly fine using Codex's tools, or whatever. I dunno, it seems like way more cost effective to use the first party tools but I'm not sure why they really want that. Are the third party tools just really inefficient with API usage or something?
> I dunno, it seems like way more cost effective to use the first party tools but I'm not sure why they really want that. Are the third party tools just really inefficient with API usage or something?
No, the first party tools, even if they used the same number of tokens, gives them valuable data for their training.
Essentially, the first party tools are subsidised because it saves them money on gathering even more training data. When you use a 3rd party tool, you are expected to pay the actual cost of each token.
Whether the tool is first-party or third-party, they still see the entirety of the prompt, which is where the valuable training data is.
For concerned customers, it'll probably be a better idea to run the models hosted in Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex.
I'm surprised that Anthropic's price is the same as their licensees.
Antigravity is useless anyway. I tried it last week and it needs approval for every file read and tool call. There's an option in the app to auto-approve, except it doesn't work. Plenty of complaints online about this. Clearly they don't actually care about the product, some exec just felt that they need to get into the editor game.
Next I tried using the Antigravity Gemini plan through OpenCode (I guess also a bannable offense?) and the first request used up my limit for the week.
No, this is hilarious: company that rams their AI down your throat at every opportunity then turns around and shuts down your account because you actually use their AI... there is no limit to the idiocy around Google's AI roll-out. I wished I could donate the AI credits that I'm paying for (thanks Google for that price increase for a product I never chose to buy) to the people that need them more.
This kind of reputational damage is just adding fuel to the fire. If my business depended in any way on google--GCP, GSuite, whatever--it would right now be a very urgent task to fire them and find replacements. They've been pretty sketchy for a while, but this kind of thing is over the top.
Terminating accounts that tried to cheat on pricing by having a third party application pretend to be Antigravity is entirely expected and does not damage Google's reputation in my view.
Yikes!! This is really unfortunate, because Google's models seem very good but there's no way I'm using a google service for this kind of thing with those policies. I don't even want to run OpenClaw, but that's scary! Plus, I have my google account tied to authenticating so many things that if my account were to be suspended or something that would be a nightmare.
I haven't tried Antigravity but I remember on release it had huge UX issues. Is this product just not ready for primetime?
There is nothing stopping you from using google models just get the correct product, you can pay for tokens then they do not care what you use it for.
The issue for me is the customer support here, not necessarily that they don't have good offerings. (I know they've always been bad at customer support, but this all seems egregious)
Just create another Google account. I don't remember there being any restrictions for this. Every time the service required a Google account to log in or it was easier than registering and going through the checks, I just created a new Google account and registered.
Excuse me giving you advice, unasked for: as part of your ‘digital life spring cleaning’ spend some time converting auth with Google/Apple/GitHub for services to logging in with your email (on your own domain) and some other second auth.
BTW, I tend to only use Google for services I pay for (YouTube+, APIs, Gemini Plus, sometimes GCP).
How about giving the user a big warning to not do that and then block the account if the user continues. This total blocks are crazy. Especially for people who use their Google account for 20+ years or something.
Google's bundling of so many services into one account is becoming a gargantuan liability for them & their users.
This "zero tolerance" policy is just absurdly mega-goliath out of touch with the world. The sort of soulless brain dead corporatism that absolutely does not think for even a single millisecond about its decisions, that doesn't care about anything other than reducing customer support or complexity, no matter what the cost.
Kicking people off their accounts for this is Google being willing to cause enormous untoward damage. With basically not even the faintest willingness to try to correct. Gobsmacking vicious indifference, ok with suffering.
Maybe European DMA or DSA should act against google kicking people off their accounts without recourse?
It seems like a temp ban here would be totally reasonable, like, "we disabled your account for a day here's why, don't do it again". Permanent though, eek!
Time and time again it is shown to *not* use your main account for everything. This goes for Apple and having a separate account for development work, for the App Store and your main iCloud account but this also goes for all other SaaS providers.
You are doing groundbreaking new and untested stuff with Claw? Do not use your main account. You want to access your main account's data? Sure, allow it via OAUTH/whatever possible way.
Have separate accounts, people. You don't want one product groups decision in those large SaaS corps to impact everything else.
> Time and time again it is shown to not use your main account for everything.
Good luck opening new google accounts for separation of concern. The new account is banned before the eula page finishes loading.
Google sends code via text msg to my main account phone number to unban, without me ever even filling a phone number.
After a day the account was banned again and pending automatic deletion. The appeal then took an artificial 5 days wait. I had to plead to what I presume is an AI. I had just paid $100 so it's not like I didn't show I was serious.
I am fairly certain that if they ban one account they will also ban the other anyways.
I have multiple Google Accounts and I am running them at the same time without problems. If you really want to separate things use different browser profiles per account. My work Google account never touches my private Google account in terms of browser profiles.
I never had issues with work accounts created via google workplace.
Google forbids you to have multiple identities. It's stated clear in their term of service. Any account you create must be linked to the same identity.
This means that it is trivial for them to ban all your accounts at once.
This also means that the 2factor is difficult to separate. Somebody with an unlocked access to my phone can hijack all my Google accounts by starting a password recovery.
Even though I made sure to never share my phone number to the new account, and I never loggued with it on my phone, and used a different browser session on desktop, it still forcefully sends a notification to my phone when I login because my login is suspicious it says. There is still no phone registered on the new account.
During reinstation of the banned accout I also got a scary msg essentially saying that if they denied my appeal, they might also ban my main account. Chilling.
Nothing new. 10 years ago my (now 20+ year) google account was compromised for a whole 5 minutes. It was used by shady bots, and instantly banned. No warnings, no nothing. Trying to figure out what had happened was a challenge in itself.
Getting through to customer support was impossible.
5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.
My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.
Google will happily screw over users with 2FA as well. A few years ago I was out of state for the funeral of someone very close to me. I lost my phone and then needed to get into my email urgently. I didn't have my computer or any other devices with me and no way to get to them. Fortunately I had actually planned ahead for something like this and added my partners phone number as a 2FA method. So I tried to login with that and Google refused!
Google said that because I had more secure 2FA methods configured it wouldn't allow my to use one of the methods that I had very intentionally configured for exactly this scenario. My opinion of the company was already pretty low but I was still shocked that they would simply discard my security settings without any warning or override option. They made one of the worst trips of my life even more miserable. Google hates their own users so much.
Can you help me understand which of these happened?
1) Open Claw has a Google OAuth client id that users are signing in with. (This seems unlikely because why would Google have approved the client or not banned it)
2) Users are creating their own OAuth client id for signing themselves into Open Claw. (Again, why would these clients be able to use APIs Google doesn't want them to?)
3) Users are taking a token minted with the Antigravity client and using it in Open Claw to call "private" APIs.
Assuming it's #3, how is that physically accomplished? And then how does Google figure out it happened?
"how does Google figure out it happened" - no insider knowledge, but the calls Claw makes are very different than the regular IDE, so the calls and volume alone would be an indicator. Maybe Google has even updated their Antigravity IDEs to just include some other User Agent, that Claw auth does not have.
Everything just guesswork, but I don't think it is too hard to figure out whether it is Antigravity calling the APIs or any Claw.
I cannot de-Google fast enough.
So if I ask Google's AI studio the wrong question, I might get my G-drive, Gmail, API access, Play store, YouTube channel, "login with Google" tokens, and more all ripped away instantly with no recourse?
No thanks
It’s an extremely strong incentive to not use Gemini for anything serious
Google is a company well down the path of enshittification, they even got rid of their motto "Don't be evil".
As a consumer, you're better served by using services from companies earlier in that lifecycle, where value accrues to you, and that's not Google, and likely not many other big providers.
When those newer companies turn, you switch. Do not allow yourself to get locked into an ecosystem. It's hard work, but it will pay dividends in the long run.
I [ctrl+f]'d for this comment in the thread linked above, and couldn't find it. May I ask where you saw that?
Same. Cannot find it in that thread and I would like to know the source too.
It’s there. User Jun_Meng.
Thank you. I wonder if partial loading or something was keeping me from finding it. Oh well.
Either way, for everyone else: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
There's the direct link to the specific post.
Google is a copycat in AI products.
Gemini Chat: ChatGPT
Gemini CLI: Claude Code
Antigravity: Cursor
Nano banana: Midjourney
Subscription API ban: copied Anthropic
NotebookLM seems to be the only exception, or it could be an acquisition.
Subscription API ban could be part of a larger strategy because of OpenClaw’s association with OpenAI and Google will not be able to copy OpenClaw Personal Assistant model due to the security implications.
Pay as you go through API pricing is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce mass adoption of a product. Pay per month works on consumption patterns where 80% of the users will barely use the product to compensate for the other 10 or 20% power users.
I'd assume API usage through tokens vs. OAuth are rate limited differently? I don't actually see hard numbers for Antigravity model rate limits on their website so guessing this is the case.
It's not about the rate limit, it's about the price, raw API calls are far more expensive then subsidised Antigravity calls.
Basically Google is saying: You can't use Gemini with OAuth on other products than Google products (Anti Gravity).
I mean it's fair, just should have been documented properly and the possibility to use Gemini through OAuth restricted with proper scope instead of saying you broke the ToS we ban your 350$/ month account.
Can openclaw go through gemini-cli? Because they can and nobody would notice anything has changed. It would use the same OAuth down the line and consume the same quotas.
Maybe the ban is overstepping but I still continue to not understand the issue. Rarely in the history of APIs has a commercial company wanted folks to use the private APIs.
It’s protectionism. These corporations are staying big because of anti competitive practices and capital. They don’t want to let go.
That’s called protecting a monopoly not protectionism
Using Google for anything other than search and email has been a poor choice for a long time.
cant you just wrap it though?
swap out the direct api call with a call to gemini cli?
That’s my question too. Presumably one could even build an API that just runs things in cli? How would they plan to restrict that? Based on usage patterns?