Anthropic has reversed a six-week ban on third-party agent tools running against Claude subscriptions, replacing it with a metered Agent SDK credit pool that takes effect June 15.
From flat-rate ban to metered credits
On April 4, Anthropic abruptly blocked third-party agents such as OpenClaw and Conductor from authenticating against Pro, Max and Team plans after discovering that some subscribers were consuming hundreds of dollars of compute per month inside flat-rate $20-$200 tiers. The new policy keeps the door open but adds a dedicated monthly Agent SDK credit pool, drawn down at API token rates, that is separate from interactive subscription usage.
The credit math
Pro ($20/mo) plans get $20 in monthly Agent SDK credit; Max 5x ($100/mo) gets $100; Max 20x ($200/mo) gets $200, with custom pools for Team and Enterprise. Credits are per-user, refresh monthly with the billing cycle and do not roll over. Once depleted, agentic workflows pause until the next reset — unless the account has separate API usage credits enabled, in which case overage continues at standard rates.
What's affected
The new pool covers the Claude Agent SDK itself, the `claude -p` headless CLI, Claude Code GitHub Actions, and third-party tools including OpenClaw, Conductor, Zed and Jean. Claude Code in interactive mode and Cowork continue to draw from the standard subscription bucket. Anthropic explained the move as ending the era of subsidized agentic compute, where a $20 Pro subscriber could burn through several hundred dollars of API-equivalent capacity per month via unoptimized harnesses.
Part of a broader Claude push
The pricing change comes as Anthropic accelerates on multiple fronts. Last week the company shipped Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 with 1M-token context, expanded Claude into finance with agent templates and Microsoft add-ins, and confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC. The Agent SDK reset positions Anthropic to keep developers building agents on Claude without bleeding compute through flat-rate arbitrage.
Reporting based on coverage from Anthropic, Coding with AI and The New Stack.