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This is draconian. > Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes con

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.

cogman10 7mo ago
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?
- esskay 7mo ago
  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.
  - jsheard 7mo ago
    > 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 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.
    - jwpapi 7mo ago
      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.
- noosphr 7mo ago
  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?
  - sowbug 7mo ago
    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.
    - sigmar 7mo ago
      > 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.
      - sowbug 7mo ago
        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.
- usef- 7mo ago
  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.
  - cedws 7mo ago
    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?
    - mark_l_watson 7mo ago
      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.
- llm_nerd 7mo ago
  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.
- chasil 7mo ago
  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.
- driverdan 7mo ago
  Hopefully this gets people to stop using Google for more than just LLMs.
- overgard 7mo ago
  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?
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - int_19h 7mo ago
      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.
      - ValentineC 7mo ago
        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.
- fy20 7mo ago
  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.
Belphemur 7mo ago
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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- gck1 7mo ago
  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.
gjsman-1000 7mo ago
[flagged]
- cogman10 7mo ago
  You can call the ToS draconian, yes. Just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it's reasonable.
  - gjsman-1000 7mo ago
    Why is it unreasonable? It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling. Don’t want to use their tooling? Pay the API rates. The API is sitting right there, ready to use for a broader range of purposes. It’s only unreasonable if you think the customer has a right to have their cake and eat it too.
    - ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
      I think the permaban without notification on first violation (that most violators likely weren't even aware was a violation) is unreasonable. This should almost certainly be illegal if it is not already under the DSA or similar, particularly for a monopolist of Google's scale.
      - johncolanduoni 7mo ago
        What about this ban is anticompetitive? The only think I can think of is accusing them of dumping product (as opposed to price discrimination), in which case the remedy is going to be to making them charge the API price for everything.
        NewsaHackO 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        oenton 7mo ago
8note 7mo ago
cant you just wrap it though? swap out the direct api call with a call to gemini cli?
- cgio 7mo ago
  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?
femiagbabiaka 7mo ago
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.
- cube00 7mo ago
  It's not about the rate limit, it's about the price, raw API calls are far more expensive then subsidised Antigravity calls.
t-writescode 7mo ago
I [ctrl+f]'d for this comment in the thread linked above, and couldn't find it. May I ask where you saw that?
- stevage 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - SilverSlash 7mo ago
    What's "tfa"?
    - chihuahua 7mo ago
      The Fine Article. It's a reference to "RTFM" = Read the F'ing Manual.
    - fennecbutt 7mo ago
      You couldn't Google this? I mean, even ChatGPT is capable of doing that.
      - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
        > TFA most commonly refers to Trifluoroacetic acid, a highly persistent, mobile "forever chemical" (PFAS) found globally in water and soil, widely used in organic chemistry as a solvent.
        runarberg 7mo ago
        When I searched for "its in the tfa meaning" this was my third result on Duck Duck Go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756 When I searched for "tfa internet meaning", The fifth result looked helpful so I clicked it, and it was: https://www.noslang.com/search/tfa https://www.noslang.com/search/tfa Searching the internet wasn’t hard before AI, and it isn’t hard today.
torginus 7mo ago
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.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - NewsaHackO 7mo ago
    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.
    - jacquesm 7mo ago
      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.
      - carshodev 7mo ago
        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.
jacquesm 7mo ago
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.
- jcgrillo 7mo ago
  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.
  - user34283 7mo ago
    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.
therealmarv 7mo ago
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.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
  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.
  - smartbit 7mo ago
    Maybe European DMA or DSA should act against google kicking people off their accounts without recourse?
- overgard 7mo ago
  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!
- moontear 7mo ago
  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.
SilverElfin 7mo ago
It’s protectionism. These corporations are staying big because of anti competitive practices and capital. They don’t want to let go.
- dmix 7mo ago
  That’s called protecting a monopoly not protectionism
nucleative 7mo ago
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
- dmix 7mo ago
  It’s an extremely strong incentive to not use Gemini for anything serious
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- ninjagoo 7mo ago
  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.
sathish316 7mo ago
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.
anon84873628 7mo ago
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?
- hiuioejfjkf 7mo ago
  [dead]
- moontear 7mo ago
  "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.
overgard 7mo ago
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?
- ludjer 7mo ago
  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.
  - overgard 7mo ago
    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)
- user205738 7mo ago
  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.
- mark_l_watson 7mo ago
  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).
petesergeant 7mo ago
Using Google for anything other than search and email has been a poor choice for a long time.
infecto 7mo ago
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.

cogman10 7mo ago

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?

esskay 7mo ago
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.
- jsheard 7mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - jwpapi 7mo ago
    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.
noosphr 7mo ago
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?
- sowbug 7mo ago
  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.
  - sigmar 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - sowbug 7mo ago
      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.
usef- 7mo ago
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.
- cedws 7mo ago
  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?
  - mark_l_watson 7mo ago
    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.
llm_nerd 7mo ago
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.
chasil 7mo ago
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.
driverdan 7mo ago
Hopefully this gets people to stop using Google for more than just LLMs.
overgard 7mo ago
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?
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - int_19h 7mo ago
    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.
    - ValentineC 7mo ago
      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.
fy20 7mo ago
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.

Belphemur 7mo ago

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.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
gck1 7mo ago
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.

gjsman-1000 7mo ago

[flagged]

cogman10 7mo ago
You can call the ToS draconian, yes. Just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it's reasonable.
- gjsman-1000 7mo ago
  Why is it unreasonable? It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling. Don’t want to use their tooling? Pay the API rates. The API is sitting right there, ready to use for a broader range of purposes. It’s only unreasonable if you think the customer has a right to have their cake and eat it too.
  - ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
    I think the permaban without notification on first violation (that most violators likely weren't even aware was a violation) is unreasonable. This should almost certainly be illegal if it is not already under the DSA or similar, particularly for a monopolist of Google's scale.
    - johncolanduoni 7mo ago
      What about this ban is anticompetitive? The only think I can think of is accusing them of dumping product (as opposed to price discrimination), in which case the remedy is going to be to making them charge the API price for everything.
      - NewsaHackO 7mo ago
        [flagged]
        oenton 7mo ago

8note 7mo ago

cant you just wrap it though? swap out the direct api call with a call to gemini cli?

cgio 7mo ago
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?

femiagbabiaka 7mo ago

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.

cube00 7mo ago
It's not about the rate limit, it's about the price, raw API calls are far more expensive then subsidised Antigravity calls.

t-writescode 7mo ago

I [ctrl+f]'d for this comment in the thread linked above, and couldn't find it. May I ask where you saw that?

stevage 7mo ago
[flagged]
- SilverSlash 7mo ago
  What's "tfa"?
  - chihuahua 7mo ago
    The Fine Article. It's a reference to "RTFM" = Read the F'ing Manual.
  - fennecbutt 7mo ago
    You couldn't Google this? I mean, even ChatGPT is capable of doing that.
    - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
      > TFA most commonly refers to Trifluoroacetic acid, a highly persistent, mobile "forever chemical" (PFAS) found globally in water and soil, widely used in organic chemistry as a solvent.
      - runarberg 7mo ago
        When I searched for "its in the tfa meaning" this was my third result on Duck Duck Go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756 When I searched for "tfa internet meaning", The fifth result looked helpful so I clicked it, and it was: https://www.noslang.com/search/tfa https://www.noslang.com/search/tfa Searching the internet wasn’t hard before AI, and it isn’t hard today.

torginus 7mo ago

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.

jacquesm 7mo ago
> 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.
- NewsaHackO 7mo ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    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.
    - carshodev 7mo ago
      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.

jacquesm 7mo ago

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.

jcgrillo 7mo ago
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.
- user34283 7mo ago
  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.

therealmarv 7mo ago

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.

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
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.
- smartbit 7mo ago
  Maybe European DMA or DSA should act against google kicking people off their accounts without recourse?
overgard 7mo ago
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!
moontear 7mo ago
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.

SilverElfin 7mo ago

It’s protectionism. These corporations are staying big because of anti competitive practices and capital. They don’t want to let go.

dmix 7mo ago
That’s called protecting a monopoly not protectionism

nucleative 7mo ago

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

dmix 7mo ago
It’s an extremely strong incentive to not use Gemini for anything serious
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
ninjagoo 7mo ago
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.

sathish316 7mo ago

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.

anon84873628 7mo ago

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?

hiuioejfjkf 7mo ago
[dead]
moontear 7mo ago
"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.

overgard 7mo ago

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?

ludjer 7mo ago
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.
- overgard 7mo ago
  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)
user205738 7mo ago
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.
mark_l_watson 7mo ago
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).

petesergeant 7mo ago

Using Google for anything other than search and email has been a poor choice for a long time.

infecto 7mo ago

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.