If I squint at the conversation, it doesn't seem that different from a behemoth company taking an employee of a private company and forcing them to still stop working for arbitrary reasons.
I'm giving agents and coding tools wide berth here, but if AI is going to replace all employees, what guarantees do you have as the employer that your employees will do your bidding, and not the bidding of enterprises with a shifting moral landscape?
Once we have tooling wrapped around specific agents, it'll be hard to rehire. What will we do then when our "employees" are furloughed?
This will be especially relevant when the big AI labs decide they need to enter a market to justify an obscene valuation. Or, when the sovereign wealth fund decides they don't like the direction of a business.
This is a good and honorable decision by Google. But it also brings up scary times ahead.
What they are actually trying to force you to do is to pay for the tokens that you don't use in their applications to increase their revenue and/or give their in-house tools an "unfair" advantage. But this is bad for the consumer because it means that there is less competition between coding agents and unless I'm willing to pay per token I have to take one of the model labs agents.
Anticompetitive behaviour imo they could just ban reselling tokens or something like that instead of locking your subscription in like this.
They have no problem with users using their quota on their own software. Because they get the signals. They do have a problem with users using the API in 3rd party software, because they don't get the signals.
This is not at all true. What is prompting this behavior from Google and Anthropic is that people are using their oauth creds/API keys to run OpenClaw bots that use orders of magnitude more tokens than the IDEs. The official clients also can use a lot more prompt caching because they have expected workflows.
And like, if you want to run OpenClaw, they’re not saying you can’t do that: use the API pricing, that’s what it’s for. But people are getting mad that they’re not allowed to roll their pickup truck up to the all-you-can-eat buffet table and fill it.
This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
The easiest way to watch a movie in the player of my choice - even if i have legal access to it because it's in my netflix subscription - is to download it off piratebay.
Add to that Netflix's shitty discovery system, I'm pretty sure I watched some downloaded movies in spite of actually having legal access to them.
Oh, remember when PC games used to come on disks? For the Netflix example I can only guess, but I'm 100% sure I downloaded isos for games I had actually bought and had the physical disc... somewhere.
A week? Try at least 16 days
https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
The danger here is they'll ban you with no specific reason, fill out the form and you get an automatic unban and then something else automatically flags and you're banned the second time permanently.
Support bot will then say "you were warned, read the TOS" and you get to guess what you did wrong.
You'll notice there are no appeals or reviews in this workflow.
Google has no creditability when it comes to handling account bans.
That's exactly what they did, plus Gemini CLI and Code Assist, which are the same product in different formats.
A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.
Its not evil of Google to say "Here is an allotment of steeply discounted tokens, but you can only use them with our services."
The correct and sane thing to do is to send them an email, with at most a 24 hour suspension. If they keep doing it despite being warned then by all means fire them.
Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.
However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.
Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.
By now they lost any trace of goodwill they ever had and are guilty until proven innocent.
And if you do use your gmail address just forward it and start to transition to something else. With time everything of importance has been transferred.
Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.
Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.
I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
After a few years you'll notice you stop bothering to check your Gmail and you can delete it to close the address.
If you need motivation, skim the /r/GMail subreddit and see how many people are getting locked out daily.
I vaguely recall encountering a service that only accepted addresses from a whitelist of big providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), even @icloud did not qualify.
What's the playbook for migrating away in this situation?
I switched to fastmail with my own domain.
Although I am increasingly concerned with its longevity since there's a non-zero risk that Proton might shut down SimpleLogin since Proton Pass has its own alias feature.
Pretty sure just moving emails would have take a lot less effort. I had the advantage of keeping the domain until I was ready to move, now imagine Google just turned it off one day and what your workload would be. I shudder to think about having to deal with that.
If people lost access to their whole accounts that would be a major crisis for Google users. But it doesn't seem that that was actually the case.
This doesn't make it super clear, but, the submission from a week ago when bans got handed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805
> bans for Antigravity usage also blocked access to Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
ToS change frequently and it’s not really fair to assume the user knows what is and is not correct use of tokens.
Google consistently fails to provide a process to deal with user issues. You donot see many reports of these at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and many more providers. Though Meta learns from google I think.
Today I could have uploaded them fine, and let whoever owns the cartoon make money I was just a fan of the show.
To be charitable, maybe they’re expecting AI agents to eventually start reading the ToS docs
cogman10•2h ago