The company is mass-deleting developer accounts following Anthropic.
Google is massively blocking the accounts of its paid subscribers, including those paying $250 per month for the AI Ultra plan. The bans stem from the use of the company's services through third-party tools like OpenClaw and OpenCode. The bans occurred without warning and have sparked outrage among developers, who are discussing the situation on forums .
The problem arose because some users were connecting third-party agent shells to Google's internal backend—the Antigravity platform and Gemini CLI. Essentially, the subscription was turning into a cheap proxy for heavy-duty offline tasks, which the service was not initially designed for, both technically and cost-wise. The load increased dramatically, and Google decided to act quickly.
Windsurf co-founder and current DeepMind engineer Varun Mohan called the incident "malicious use" that has seriously degraded the service for regular users. In a social media post, he promised to reinstate some of the suspended accounts—those whose owners were unaware they were violating the rules. However, users themselves disagree with this interpretation.
"People paid for quota, used it within the limits, and got banned. This isn't malicious use, it's using the product they were sold," wrote AI engineer Mohan Prakash in his post . He also pointed out that the service's rules didn't explicitly prohibit integration with OpenClaw, meaning users reasonably believed it was acceptable. He cited Anthropic as an example of appropriate behavior: in similar cases, it simply returns an error instead of banning accounts.
Google's story mirrors what happened earlier with Anthropic, which also blocked users who subscribed to third-party services instead of a more expensive API. Both cases point to the same systemic problem: AI companies sell tokens significantly below cost , seeking to capture the market in the hopes of raising prices later. When users begin to use the service excessively, it becomes clear that the business model simply can't sustain it. The price for this is lost in user trust and the company's reputation.
Google is massively blocking the accounts of its paid subscribers, including those paying $250 per month for the AI Ultra plan. The bans stem from the use of the company's services through third-party tools like OpenClaw and OpenCode. The bans occurred without warning and have sparked outrage among developers, who are discussing the situation on forums .
The problem arose because some users were connecting third-party agent shells to Google's internal backend—the Antigravity platform and Gemini CLI. Essentially, the subscription was turning into a cheap proxy for heavy-duty offline tasks, which the service was not initially designed for, both technically and cost-wise. The load increased dramatically, and Google decided to act quickly.
Windsurf co-founder and current DeepMind engineer Varun Mohan called the incident "malicious use" that has seriously degraded the service for regular users. In a social media post, he promised to reinstate some of the suspended accounts—those whose owners were unaware they were violating the rules. However, users themselves disagree with this interpretation.
"People paid for quota, used it within the limits, and got banned. This isn't malicious use, it's using the product they were sold," wrote AI engineer Mohan Prakash in his post . He also pointed out that the service's rules didn't explicitly prohibit integration with OpenClaw, meaning users reasonably believed it was acceptable. He cited Anthropic as an example of appropriate behavior: in similar cases, it simply returns an error instead of banning accounts.
Google's story mirrors what happened earlier with Anthropic, which also blocked users who subscribed to third-party services instead of a more expensive API. Both cases point to the same systemic problem: AI companies sell tokens significantly below cost , seeking to capture the market in the hopes of raising prices later. When users begin to use the service excessively, it becomes clear that the business model simply can't sustain it. The price for this is lost in user trust and the company's reputation.
