Why is Google cracking down on OpenClaw users in antigravity?

New Delhi: Google has officially announced and restricted its access to the AI Coding platform Antigravity for users who were recently starting to route Gemini tokens through OpenClaw, this open-source AI framework, citing malicious usage that is degrading the service for other customers.

This ban, which began over the weekend, has caught several developers off guard. Those users on X and Y Combinator has forums reported that they are losing the access to Antigravity without any prior warning. Some have even raised concerns about their broader Google accounts being affected, given that Google’s AI products share the same account infrastructure as Gmail and Workspace.

Google DeepMind engineer and former Windsurf CEO, Varun Mohan, has also confirmed the action in a post they have shared on the X platform. Varun Mohan has said that by seeing a massive increase in the users exploiting the Antigravity backend as the proxy for the third-party platforms, they are overwhelming the compute resources, which are meant for paying the subscribers.

He also wrote that, “We understand the subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS, and it will get the path for them to come back on, but we have the limited capacity and wanted to be fair to our actual users.”

This core issue is straightforward: OpenClaw lets users plug into AI models through alternative interfaces, effectively by burning more tokens than the subscription pricing accounts. Google has stated that this flooded Antigravity’s backend, and it will hurt the experience for everyone else. This move isn’t a permanent ban, but it is an effort to bring usage in line with the platform’s terms of service.

Now, there is one catch that some of the users don’t know: Google isn’t alone here. In just two days before the Antigravity crackdown, Anthropic upgraded its terms to explicitly ban OAuth token usage from the Claude subscriptions in third-party tools, by including OpenClaw.

This pattern is very clear: the AI providers are tightening the leash on how their models can be accessed outside first-party interfaces. Varun Mohan stated that Google is now working to restore access for those affected users, but it offered no timeline. But for now, the developers who are relying on third-party agent tools to tap into the frontier models might want to rethink that setup.