Google customers paying $250 per month for AI Ultra subscriptions and less extravagant spenders have been surprised to find their accounts suspended for using the company’s Antigravity agent development app and Gemini services with third-party agent tools like OpenClaw and OpenCode.
Over the past few weeks, Google has been cutting off customers for terms of service violations, often with no warning. The problem for Google is that when third-party agent wrappers or harnesses rely on Google AI under the hood, the company’s software isn’t necessarily priced or provisioned for heavy autonomous usage.
Many of the software developers who subscribed to these AI services have expressed surprise in various discussion threads, claiming that they were unaware their actions violated contractual agreements they’re unlikely to have actually read.
Varun Mohan, co-founder of Windsurf and now a DeepMind engineer, said that the account bans followed from malicious usage, though customers argue that that’s a mischaracterization of what they were doing.
“We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Antigravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users,” he explained in a social media post on Sunday.
“We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended. We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our [Terms of Service] 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 went on to clarify that Google has blocked usage of Antigravity but not other Google services.
“It is not intended to use the Antigravity backend as a proxy for other products and users in these groups have overwhelmed our compute,” he explained. “We are going to make sure we bring people back on but needed to act fast to make sure we deliver a good experience for people using the product.”
The Register asked Google to provide examples of malicious usage. We’ve not heard back.
Dissatisfied customers have expressed skepticism that using Antigravity and Gemini CLI with a third-party wrapper or harness like OpenClaw can legitimately be characterized as malicious.
“Users paid for quota, used quota within limits, got banned,” said AI engineer Mohan Prakash in a social media post. “That’s not malicious, that’s using the product you sold them. The real issue is the [Terms of Service] doesn’t explicitly ban OpenClaw integration, so users assumed it was allowed. If you don’t want harness integration, return an error like Anthropic does – this usage pattern is not permitted. Banning paying customers without warning is how you lose trust faster than you lose capacity.”
Google’s account purge follows similar measures taken by Anthropic to prevent users from engaging in token price arbitrage by connecting subscription accounts, instead of its higher-cost API, to third-party services.
It appears that Google made machine learning model tokens too readily available through free tier accounts and non-specific quotas. As a result, the company wasn’t prepared for the compute demand or the cost incurred when developers ran its AI services through third-party software.
This suggests what many have already observed – that AI companies are selling tokens at far below cost to gain market share, in the hope they can outspend the competition until the competition goes away and they can raise prices. ®
