Google bans Antigravity users over OpenClaw access, cites surge in ‘malicious usage’ | Technology News

3 min readNew DelhiFeb 23, 2026 01:13 PM Google restricted the accounts of several users, including Antigravity and Gemini AI Ultra subscribers, who accessed its Gemini AI models through open-source AI agent OpenClaw, the search giant has partially confirmed.
Varun Mohan, former Windsurf CEO and Google Deepmind engineer, said that the company has detected a “massive increase” in malicious activity on the backend of its AI coding platform Antigravity. “We’ve been seeing a massive increase in malicious usage of the Anitgravity backend that has tremendously degraded the quality of service for our users,” Mohan wrote in a post on X on Monday, February 23.
His remarks came a day after several Gemini AI Ultra subscribers on the Google AI Developer Forum posted about not being able to access the Gemini 2.5 Pro model and in some cases, other linked services such as Gmail and Google Workspace accounts.
The abrupt action came without warning or explanation, they said. However, Mohan’s post on X makes it clearer that the restrictions may have been triggered developers’ use of third-party tools such as OpenClaw as this is reportedly against Google’s terms of service.
“We needed to find a path to quickly shut off access to these users that are not using the product as intended,” Mohan said.
“We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS 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,” he added.
Similar to Google, Anthropic updated its Consumer Terms of Service last week to explicitly ban OAuth token usage in third-party tools, including OpenClaw. “Using OAuth tokens obtained through Claude Free, Pro, or Max accounts in any other product, tool, or service, including the Agent SDK, is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the Consumer Terms of Service,” the updated compliance page states.Story continues below this ad

The move underscores the growing turf war in the AI race and signals a shift toward more closed, tightly controlled ecosystems. It also highlights the various challenges that come with AI agents such as OpenClaw, which is billed as an AI assant that can stay on top of emails, deal with insurers, check in for flights and perform myriad other tasks.
OpenClaw has had a viral rise since it was first introduced in November, receiving more than 100,000 stars on code repository GitHub and drawing 2 million visitors in a single week, according to a blog post Peter Steinberger, the creator of the open-source AI agent framework.
Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Steinberger will be joining the ChatGPT-maker to “drive the next generation of personal agents.” “OpenClaw will live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support,” he added.
However, agentic AI tools such as OpenClaw have also attracted scrutiny, with China’s industry minry recently warning that the open-source AI agent could pose significant security risks when improperly configured and expose users to cyberattacks and data breaches.
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