Are you a subscriber to Anthropic’s Claude Pro ($20 monthly) or Max ($100-$200 monthly) plans and use its Claude AI models and products to power third-party AI agents like OpenClaw? If so, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise.

Anthropic announced a few hours ago that starting tomorrow, Saturday, April 4, 2026, at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET, it will no longer be possible for those Claude subscribers to use their subscriptions to hook Anthropic’s Claude models up to third-party agentic tools, citing the strain such usage was placing on Anthropic’s compute and engineering resources, and desire to serve a wide number of users reliably.

“We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools,” wrote Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, in a post on X. “Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API.”

The company also reportedly sent out an email to this effect to some subscribers. However, it’s not certain if subscribers to Claude Team and Enterprise will be impacted similarly. We’ve reached out to Anthropic for further clarification and will update when we hear back.

To be clear, it will still be possible to use Claude models like Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku to power OpenClaw and similar external agents, but users will now need to opt into a pay-as-you-go “extra usage” billing system or utilize Anthropic’s application programming interface (API), which charges for every token of usage rather than allowing for open-ended usage up to certain limits, as the Pro and Max plans have allowed so far.

The reason for the change: ‘third party services are not optimized’

The technical reality, according to Anthropic, is that its first-party tools like Claude Code, its AI vibe coding harness, and Claude Cowork, its business app interfacing and control tool, are built to maximize “prompt cache hit rates”—reusing previously processed text to save on compute.

Third-party harnesses like OpenClaw often bypass these efficiencies. “Third party services are not optimized in this way, so it’s really hard for us to do sustainably,” Cherny explained further on X.

He even revealed his own hands-on attempts to bridge the gap: “I did put up a few PRs to improve prompt cache hit rate for OpenClaw in particular, which should help for folks using it with Claude via API/overages.”

Prior to the news, Anthropic had also begun imposing stricter Claude session limits every 5 hours of usage during business hours (5am-11am PT/8am-2pm ET), meaning that the number of tokens you could send during those sessions dropped.

This frustrated some power users who suddenly began reaching their limits far faster than they had previously — a change Anthropic said was to help “manage growing demand for Claude” and would only affect up to 7% of users at any given time.

Discounts and credits to soften the blow

Anthropic is not banning third-party tools entirely, but it is moving them to a different ledger. The new “Extra Usage” bundles represent a middle ground between a flat-rate subscription and a full enterprise API account.

• The Credit: To “soften the blow,” Anthropic is offering existing subscribers a one-time credit equal to their monthly plan price, redeemable until April 17.

• The Discount: Users who pre-purchase “extra usage” bundles can receive up to a 30% discount, an attempt to retain power users who might otherwise churn.

• Capacity Management: Anthropic’s official statement noted that these tools put an “outsized strain” on systems, forcing a prioritization of “customers using our core products and API.”

‘The all you-can-eat buffet just closed’

The response from the developer community has been a mixture of analytical acceptance and sharp frustration.

Growth marketer Aakash Gupta observed on X that the “all-you-can-eat buffet just closed,” noting that a single OpenClaw agent running for one day could burn $1,000 to $5,000 in API costs. “Anthropic was eating that difference on every user who routed through a third-party harness,” Gupta wrote. “That’s the pace of a company watching its margin evaporate in real time.”

However, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who was recently hired by OpenAI, took a more skeptical view of the “capacity” argument.“Funny how timings match up,” Steinberger posted on X. “First they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.”

Indeed, Anthropic recently added some of the same capabilities that helped OpenClaw catch-on — such as the ability to message agents through external services like Discord and Telegram — to Claude Code.

Steinberger claimed that he and fellow investor Dave Morin attempted to “talk sense” into Anthropic, but were only able to delay the enforcement by a single week.

User @ashen_one, founder of Telaga Charity, voiced a concern likely shared by other small-scale builders: “If I switch both [OpenClaw instances] to an API key or the extra usage you’re recommending here, it’s going to be far too expensive to make it worth using. I’ll probably have to switch over to a different model at this point.”

.“I know it sucks,” Cherny replied. “Fundamentally engineering is about tradeoffs, and one of the things we do to serve a lot of customers is optimize the way subscriptions work to serve as many people as possible with the best mode

Licensing and the OpenAI shadow

The timing of the crackdown is particularly notable given the talent migration. When Steinberger joined OpenAI in February 2026, he brought the “OpenClaw” ethos with him.

OpenAI appears to be positioning itself as a more “harness-friendly” alternative, potentially using this moment as a customer acquisition channel for disgruntled Claude power users.

By restricting subscription limits to their own “closed harness,” Anthropic is asserting control over the UI/UX layer. This allows them to collect telemetry and manage rate limits more granularly, but it risks alienating the power-user community that built the “agentic” ecosystem in the first place.

The Bottom Line

Anthropic’s decision is a cold calculation of margins versus growth. As Cherny noted, “Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully.”

In the 2026 AI landscape, the era of subsidized, unlimited compute for third-party automation is over.

For the average user on Claude.ai, the experience remains unchanged; for the power users running autonomous offices, the bell has tolled.

Microsoft is investigating and working to resolve Exchange Online mailbox access issues that have intermittently affected Outlook mobile and macOS users for weeks.

When it first acknowledged this service issue (tracked under EX1256020) last week, Microsoft said it started on March 11 and that the root cause was a newly introduced virtual account. While the company flagged it as resolved on April 1, the incident has been re-added to the admin message center under a different tag (EX1268771).

“We’ve received reports from affected tenants that the impact scenario originally communicated through SHD EX1256020 is still ongoing. We’re working to restart the Notification Broker service on affected portions of Exchange Online service infrastructure to remediate impact while we continue our analysis into the underlying root cause,” Microsoft says.

“Impact may occur intermittently for some users accessing their Exchange Online mailboxes in the Outlook mobile apps or the new Outlook for Mac desktop client. This section may be updated as our investigation progresses.”

In the latest update issued on Thursday evening, the Exchange Online team said it’s still investigating the root cause and working on additional measures to prevent this issue from recurring.

While Microsoft has yet to share which regions or how many users have been affected by this issue over the last three weeks, it flagged this as an incident, which typically applies to critical service issues with noticeable user impact.

Earlier this month, Microsoft mitigated an Exchange Online outage that prevented users from accessing mailboxes and calendars via Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync, and other Exchange Online connection protocols.

The same day, it fixed a separate issue that caused Office.com or Microsoft 365 Copilot web sign‑in problems affecting the Microsoft Copilot desktop app, Copilot in Microsoft Teams, and Copilot in Office apps.

Another Exchange Online service outage that intermittently blocked email via the Internet Mailbox Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4) was addressed in January, while a similar incident blocked Exchange Online access via the classic Outlook desktop client in November.

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The Qilin ransomware group has stolen data from Die Linke, a German democratic socialist political party, and is threatening to leak it.

On March 27, a day after the threat actor compromised its network, the party disclosed a cyber incident but stopped short of confirming a data breach.

Founded in 2007, the Die Linke (Left Party) is currently represented in the German parliament (Bundestag) through 64 members. It has 123,000 registered members and participates in several state governments, especially in eastern Germany.

“According to current findings, the attackers aim to publish sensitive data from the internal areas of the party organization as well as personal information of employees at the party headquarters,” Die Linke says.

“It is currently unclear whether and to what extent this has succeeded or has already occurred. However, such a risk exists.”

The party clarified that its membership database wasn’t impacted, specifically stating that the attackers failed in their effort to obtain member data.

Die Linke said that it received information that behind the attack is the Qilin ransomware group, describing the threat actor as Russian-speaking cybercriminals that are both financially and politically motivated. The German party also said that the attack on its systems “does not appear to be coincidental in this context.”

“Such digital attacks, and ransomware use in particular, are often part of hybrid warfare and constitute an attack on critical infrastructure,” commented the party.

On April 1st, Qilin claimed the attack on Die Link publicly, adding it to the list of victims on its data leak site without publishing any data samples.

Threatening to publish stolen data is a standard pressure tactic to coerce victims into paying a ransom.

Die Linke has notified the German authorities and filed a criminal complaint with the police. Additionally, the party is working with independent IT experts to help them safely restore impacted systems.

Russia-linked threat actors have targeted political parties in Germany in the past. In 2024, Mandiant uncovered a campaign from APT29 targeting CDU, a major political party in the country, with a backdoor named WineLoader.

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In the Chinese calendar, 2026 marks the year of the Fire Horse, and it could also be the year of the Hisense TV.

The Fire Horse represents a “rare, high-energy, and transformative year” that happens every sixty years, which for a Chinese company such as Hisense, must be a good omen.

It feels confident this is the year where it can become a leader in the UK market. It wants to be in pole position with the new RGB TVs, it’s sponsoring the FIFA World Cup which will give it a global reach, and its TVs – at least based on its 2025 output – reached new levels of quality and performance.

It’s all looking good, right?

Yes, but there is one area where Hisense needs to improve on with its RGB TVs, and it’s a biggie.

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An overreliance on Dolby Vision

When I went to Leeds to see the biggest TV in the world, the 116UXN, I was initially impressed by its high brightness and dazzling colour performance. If RGB is the future of TVs, then it’s going to be a very colourful one.

With the test discs I brought with me (Across the Spider-Verse, First Man, Babylon), the 116UXN produced a bright, varied, rich but also balanced colour performance. It served up black levels without much in the way of blooming or bleeding, an impressive level of dimming control for a screen of this size.

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While there were some issues: a little bit of green tint here, some colour shifting when up close to the screen and some slightly washed out black levels, the performance seemed a strong one.

And then I switched away from Dolby Vision titles and things were… not so great.

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With HDR10 and there was more noticeable discolouration, shots in films went from sharp to soft and back to sharp again. The Dirty Screen Effect seemed more obvious, with images that lacked clarity and detail, along with obvious colour banding. For a £24,999 screen, that’s rather unacceptable.

In HDR10+ the performance slipped further, colours that came across as inconsistent, images with soft sense of detail in dark scenes and the strangest thing was the local dimming struggled to react with scenes that switched from bright and dark, the entire screen repeatedly flashing and over-brightening the image.

You could call these first-gen gremlins that come with every new tech but I think the UXN is too reliant on Dolby Vision to help with its processing.

This is an issue I’ve seen before on Hisense TVs in years past, but I felt the U8Q had shrugged that off with a more consistent performance across all its HDR modes.

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It came up again when I went to TCL’s NXT Roadshow event in Paris. There was a line-up of several TVs that included TCL’s SQD Mini LED and RGB Mini LED, a Samsung QN90F, a Sony A95L QD-OLED and a Hisense UXN.

And the Hisense was the worse performing TV of the bunch.

One test feature a white stripe in the middle of a green block, and where the other TVs managed to keep the stripe ‘white’, with the Hisense, the stripe was polluted by green tones surrounded it, coming across as a light green. The Hisense RGB didn’t look very bright, colours were all over the place with red tones looking orange, blues were more teal-like in its Standard picture mode.

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Throw in more obvious blooming than other models and it was a very shaky and imprecise performance from the Hisense UXN.

Picture processing is an area that Hisense needs to shore up. The Hisense RGB I saw in Leeds was very reliant on Dolby Vision to control its performance, but without Dolby’s guiding hand, the performance became much more inconsistent.

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What this calls into question is Hisense’s PQ philosophy. Every TV brand has one (or should have one), but beyond trying to make its TVs very bright and colourful, I can’t describe what Hisense’s ethos is. Is it respecting the source? Is it going full-on with colour expression? Is it trying to do all the above?

I hope what I saw with the UXN isn’t an omen for the upcoming UXQ, UR9S and UR8S. In all the time I’ve been reviewing Hisense TVs, processing has been hit and miss.

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If it truly wants to be a leader in the market, it has to lead the way in picture quality – it has to be better than its rivals. If, like the Fire Horse it wants to have a transformative year, then this is the biggest hurdle it has to clear.

The Maytag Man is one of the most enduring characters in American advertising, lonely because no one needs his help repairing a Maytag appliance. The Maytag brand, too, has endured—going back to the days when Frederick Maytag’s washers involved wooden tubs and cranks. Maytag was the first company to put an agitator at the bottom of a washing machine, a design still in use today, and it was the first to stack a washer and dryer, and one of the earliest adopters on smart appliances. But mostly, the brand has eschewed novelty and staked its claim on durability and reliability for its heavy-duty dishwashers, washers, dryers, refrigerators, and ovens. This is true even as Maytag folded into ownership by former competitor Whirlpool.

Maytag remains one of the few appliance companies to offer 10-year limited warranties on essential parts. But Maytag promo codes are a bit more ephemeral, offering short-term deals on appliances that will hopefully last a decade. Here’s how to get a Maytag coupon code and Maytag promo codes, and find closeout deals on last season’s Maytag appliances to save even more.

Save Big With Maytag Appliance Closeout Deals

One of the easiest ways to find a deal on Maytag appliances is to look at the overstock and closeout deals, which offer significant markdowns on last season’s items as Maytag looks to clear out space for the new models. These deals do not require a Maytag coupon code, but they do require knowing where to look.

Go to the Maytag outlet site for appliance closeout deals. As of April 2026, this includes a $729 range with a built-in air fryer that used to sell for $1,300, and a $600 deal on a well-reviewed top-load dryer that previously sold for a thousand dollars. These deals generally last only until supplies run out.

Claim Free Delivery on Major Appliances Over $399

From now through April 8, Maytag customers can get free delivery on appliances priced $399 and above. Even better, Maytag will also haul away your old appliance for free. This deal does not require a Maytag discount code and includes standard home delivery for refrigerators, ranges, and laundry units. The discount will be applied automatically in your online shopping cart when you check out. Also, be sure to check the Maytag deals page often for current offers and rotating Maytag discounts and sales.

Select Customers Can Get a Special Maytag Promo Code

Like many big companies, Maytag offers professional discounts for military, first responders, healthcare workers, students, and teachers. To receive up to a 15% discount for active military, veterans, and spouses, you’ll need to create a Maytag account and then verify your military status using the SheerID program. Maytag first responder discounts and healthcare worker discounts also require SheerID verification. There’s also a discount program for both students and teachers, including a teacher savings program and up to 15% off sitewide. Verified students are able to access pricing unique to students, when moving into their first off-campus apartment.

Work Smarter, Not Harder With Maytag Smart Appliances

Maytag is also offering deals on select smart appliances. As of early April, this includes a somewhat unique combination toaster-microwave that’s about $100 off MSRP, and a slide-in electric range with smart connectivity that’s on a steep discount to $1,260—hundreds of dollars less than even other recent sale prices. You can check out the special Maytag deals on connected and smart appliances by scrolling down to the bottom of Maytag’s smart appliance page.