Chinese AI rivals clash over Anthropic’s OpenClaw exit amid global token crunch
Chinese companies are competing to offer the cheapest alternatives to premium US services from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic
Chinese tech companies are engaged in a public war of words as they compete to capitalise on US start-up Anthropic’s decision to pull its industry-leading Claude models from open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw.
The development comes as AI agents have triggered a huge increase in demand for AI tokens – the core metric of AI usage – raising questions about the long-term ability of industry players to meet this demand amid a growing global crunch in computational power.
On Sunday, Anthropic announced that Claude subscriptions would no longer cover usage on third-party tools like OpenClaw, a move it said was needed to “prioritise existing customers” of its own products.
Chinese companies MiniMax and Xiaomi quickly weighed in, encouraging users to switch to their own token subscription plans instead.
In a post on X, Shanghai-based MiniMax accused Anthropic of hurting the AI community by introducing its restrictions.
“There will be more good ideas of how to use AI coming from outside the AI labs than in them,” MiniMax said. “Limiting AI subs to first-party products kills these ideas before they are ever born.”
An increasing number of Chinese companies are rolling out token subscription plans with different pricing tiers that allow users to pay fixed amounts each month, offering better value for money than accessing AI models directly through their application programming interface, or API.
Other domestic rivals including Zhipu AI have also unveiled subscription plans in recent months, as they look to tap the lucrative AI application market of software development worth trillions of dollars, according to Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Chinese companies have been competing to offer the cheapest alternatives to premium US services from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Beijing-based Zhipu offers one of the industry’s cheapest annual subscriptions at US$84 a year, which it says offers three times more usage than Anthropic’s Claude Pro plan priced at US$204 a year.
However, price undercutting was not necessarily healthy for the industry, Xiaomi warned. On X, MiMo team leader and former DeepSeek star researcher
said global computational capacity was not keeping up with the token demand created by AI agents, meaning the “real way forward isn’t cheaper tokens”.
While encouraging users to switch to their subscription plan, which was launched a day before Anthropic’s announcement, Luo praised Anthropic for taking a “short term” hit to promote greater discipline in the industry overall.
“I’d urge [large language model] companies not to blindly race to the bottom on pricing before figuring out how to price a coding plan without haemorrhaging money,” she said, suggesting that some rivals were getting users to “impulse-pay and then abandon ship”.
Her comments come as early users of Chinese subscription plans have
about degraded performance and rate limit issues, prompting some of them, including Zhipu, to raise prices this year.
Despite being a latecomer to the global AI model race,
have quickly gained traction in the developer community, with its flagship MiMo-V2-Pro hitting No 1 in usage on AI model marketplace OpenRouter last month after the company allowed users to try it for free.
However, this has invited criticism that Xiaomi is doing what it warns others not to. Under Luo’s post on X, fintech giant Ant Group’s open-source AI lead Richard Bian accused Xiaomi of “abusing the OpenRouter ranking” and “kicking down the ladder” it had climbed up on.
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