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.”