opus 4.7 back on openclaw through Claude CLI

🚀

the openclaw api bill just went back to zero for me lol, was paying $1500 this month

remember three weeks ago when anthropic said no more subscriptions for third party tools. everybody wrote their hot take. i moved my pipeline to the openai api to cut losses.

turns out that story was half right.

what anthropic actually banned was openclaw harnesses pulling your oauth token out of claude code and calling the anthropic api directly while pretending to be claude code. fair. that was legitimately bad behavior.

but there is a second pattern they did not ban. shelling out to the claude cli itself with dash p. claude code runs the request. claude code handles auth. claude code does the caching. openclaw is just calling the binary.

anthropic staff confirmed to the openclaw team that one is still sanctioned. openclaw treats it as official green light unless they publish a new policy.

i flipped my main session to it this afternoon. one line in openclaw.json. set provider to claude-cli and mode to oauth. my opus 4.7 sessions are now running through my max subscription instead of the api.

no per token bill on the main session.

catch: your subscription cap is still real. pro has one, max has one. i hit my 5 hour cap two days ago when the rza cron tried to write a script through it. blew right through my usage window in the middle of the day.

the fix was simple. only the main session touches claude oauth. every cron, every coding task, every background job goes to gpt 5.4 on the openai api. that keeps the claude cap for thinking and planning, not bulk content generation.

if you dont have claude max, the same pattern works elsewhere. glm coding plan starts at 10 a month, qwen around 28, minimax at 10 for the starter tier. run a local cli, subscription handles the billing, no per token bleed.

if your using claude code in your .openclaw workspace folder just tell claude to wire it up for you

full video on this drops in 1 hour on yt.

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