Anthropic Broke My OpenClaw Stack. GPT 5.4 Put It Back Together

Anthropic restricted third-party harness use in Claude subscriptions, directly affecting tools like OpenClaw.

Attempts to route through Claude CLI were still blocked when the traffic looked like system-prompt wrapper harnesses.

The author ultimately abandoned a Claude-centered stack and rebuilt OpenClaw around GPT 5.4 as the orchestrator and Gemini for research.

Claude is now used only selectively, with local-first retrieval and storage added to make the setup more resilient.