Google has restricted access to its AI coding platform Antigravity for users who were routing Gemini tokens through OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework, citing “malicious usage” that degraded the service for other customers.The crackdown, which began over the weekend, caught several developers off guard. Users on X and Y Combinator forums reported losing access to Antigravity without any prior warning. Some 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.

Varun Mohan, a Google DeepMind engineer and former Windsurf CEO, confirmed the action in a post on X. He said the company had seen a “massive increase” in users exploiting the Antigravity backend as a proxy for third-party platforms, overwhelming compute resources meant for paying subscribers.“We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users,” Mohan wrote.

OpenClaw’s token routing pushed Antigravity’s servers to the edge

The core issue is straightforward. OpenClaw lets users plug into AI models through alternative interfaces, effectively burning through more tokens than subscription pricing accounts for. Google says this flooded Antigravity’s backend and hurt the experience for everyone else.A Google DeepMind spokesperson told VentureBeat the move isn’t a permanent ban but an effort to bring usage in line with the platform’s terms of service.

Anthropic faced the same problem—and acted days earlier

Google isn’t alone here. Just two days before the Antigravity crackdown, Anthropic updated its terms to explicitly ban OAuth token usage from Claude subscriptions in third-party tools, including OpenClaw. The pattern is clear—AI providers are tightening the leash on how their models can be accessed outside first-party interfaces.Mohan said Google is working to restore access for affected users but offered no timeline. For now, developers relying on third-party agent tools to tap into frontier models may want to rethink that setup.