Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.
Use a custom domain and don't use google for email.
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.
This wasn't due to some random Gemini request. Users were using sketchy antigravity auth plugins to use their antigravity tokens on things like OpenClaw, clearly against ToS. It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account
As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence.
At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.
yeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.
Using Gmail as your primary email has become a serious risk. Email was once a distinct thing but Google tying it to your everything-account makes gmail terrible.
> The digital death sentence of losing access to your email
I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...
> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk
There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.
And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.
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.
Ex googler here. It is based on Google’s fundamental disdain of customers. Googlers are repeatedly told by management that they are the smartest people in the world and that their time is too valuable to spend on silly things like helping customers.
Google has zero customer service. using them for anything serious makes no business sense. the only thing that they're good for is serving ads to people, and they have a support team for that, but only if you're spending a lot of money, and even then good luck finding it
I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish.
I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.
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.
>I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.
This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
> I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota
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.
I wrote this as a work around to use my subscriptions for claude, chatgpt pro, grok from codex cli but seems like gemini is already broken and will require another approach after this
Nobody is forcing you to pay for tokens you don’t use. If you only want to pay for the tokens you use, switch to api billing and pay for tokens at api rates.
If you want the discounted rates they offer in their monthly plans, then expect to follow the terms that discount is offered under.
> But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.
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.
I think the deal is quite clear: subscription for personal usage in their products, API token for everything else. You get a rebate for subscription because they get the data. I would be quite sad if they removed the subscription option just to not be "anticompetitive".
> Using third-party software, tools, or services to harvest or piggyback on Gemini CLI's OAuth authentication to access our backend services is a direct violation of Gemini CLI’s applicable terms and policies.
It's been 2 months since these bans have started, first Anthropic, then Google. And their wording is still so confusing that I can't get a simple answer to a simple question:
Is piggybacking on headless 'gemini-cli -p' or 'claude -p' a TOS violation? Because there's really no reason why you can't do exactly what these tools did that caused these two companies to start giving out bans.
Unless you're in for a very specific configuration of models for some niche concern, CLIs give you nearly exact same access to the backend that snatching an OAuth token from them does. They give you JSONL for stdin, JSONL for stdout, and if you spin up a local proxy, you even get the same exact API contract in responses that you get from public APIs.
In fact, I already built a small tool for myself that does exactly that, to allow usage of alternative harnesses I prefer. Once I release it to the public, will -p be banned too?
I think the issue is people are using tools in an automated fashion and running up a compute bill for free when they were only meant to be used by humans in a more limited capacity (for companies to gather data on how to improve their products for humans). I think the correct way to use these models in an automated fashion is via the APIs and even then they might also worry about things like abuse/distillation type attacks still if the volume is too high. I think the lack of transparency might actually be by design so that people abusing their services don't figure out what triggers them losing their accounts. I could be wrong of course, this is just speculation on my part.
>Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
The Gemini-CLI situation is poor. They did not communicate that AI Pro or AI Ultra accounts cannot be used with this API broadly earlier. I specifically remember searching for this info. Seeing this made me wonder if I had missed it. Turns out it was added to the TOS 2 days ago - diff
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/pull/20488/chang.... I'd be happy to stand corrected here.
Anti Gravity I understand, they are subsidizing to promote a general IDE, but I dont understand constraining the generative AI backend that Gemini CLI hits.
The deeper issue here isn't about Antigravity specifically. It's that email is most people's de facto digital identity. Every password reset, every 2FA recovery, every account verification flows through it. When a company can revoke access to your email over a ToS violation in a completely unrelated product, the stakes are disproportionate.
The fix is surprisingly straightforward: own your domain, use a provider that focuses on email, and keep your client separate from your provider. Standard IMAP means all three pieces are interchangeable. If one fails, swap it out.
(I work on Marco [0], an IMAP email client. The number of people looking to decouple from Gmail/Google has been growing steadily, definitely a current trend.)
What I don’t understand about policy violations is why Google never warns the user before banning. A simple alert or email would reduce so much frustration on the part of users and so much overhead for Google.
ToS change frequently and it’s not really fair to assume the user knows what is and is not correct use of tokens.
I think from their end, they see a lot more malicious users (e.g. spam accounts) that it's not worth providing a gentle warning before a ban. There might've been thousands more accounts created for Chinese companies for distillation[0], that Google didn't think of/weren't able to initially distinguish genuine user accounts just using a third party tool on their Antigravity token.
Like in a similar vein, Instagram sometimes randomly bans genuine users without appeal, probably because they deal with thousands more spam accounts that don't deserve a warning/appeals process.
Not just Google. This seems to be the default for most tech giants. I was banned on Facebook for an unknown reason, not provided any explanation, and given zero recourse. Had to resort to reaching out to a friend who worked there.
It is very easy to understand -- Google loses nothing by acting this way. They despise these users (and users in general by not providing any meaningful customer service), so it's natural they just cut off access completely.
If you think about how people's entire Google accounts are getting banned without apparently violating any terms without the ability to talk to someone or appeal, this feels almost nothing.
It’s interesting that with both Anthropic and Google we’re seeing them develop agentic models that are supposed to do anything a human can do on computers without human intervention, but at the same time, if you plug one program into another of their programs or APIs in a way that wasn’t preapproved you may be blocked or banned.
To be charitable, maybe they’re expecting AI agents to eventually start reading the ToS docs
In my mind Google is the one AI provider which is more or less guaranteed to make it past the next 2-5 years. Maybe anthropic and openai can be profitable with current model. But they'll never get to stop investing in next model while Google is there with infinite money.
So either scaling stops hard here pretty soon so that spending can stabilize or else the investors are going to be showing up asking for several pounds of flesh.
Suddenly 'dont get left behind, this is the worst these models will ever be' sounds a lot more like 'get locked in with a hyper giant that'll destroy your livelihood and not notice'.
Although who knows, maybe local models will be a thing (however when your dev team gets banned with no explanation and the next milestone is coming up somehow I don't expect that transition to go sufficiently quick).
I see a lot of comments in googles defense, part of me wonders whats the split between google employees(even so people in teams related to these products) and normies who ignore the true underlying issue here…
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.
Just wanted to say that Windsurf is chugging along just great. No drama for users, excellent outputs at low cost. I am confused why they are not used more widely.
All this whole thing did is ensure I never, ever use any google AI service. The fact that they didn't instantly comprehend what a total account ban means when they've got people with 20+ years worth of personal data in those accounts is incredibly concerning.
What’s my remedy when Google’s product (Gemini 3.1 pro high) makes a “grave” mistake? This is unrelated to the bans that’s been happening recently, but wanted to share …
This morning I asked Gemini to “save” its output to a local file. However it did more than that … it committed the file (along with several unrelated staged changes that was not ready to be committed) and even pushed the changes to GitHub. I’ve never asked any model to commit, let alone push… I’m not impressed; actually a bit disappointed that it would do this without any warning up front. This happened in Antigravity.
problem is google's security concerns. when people connect gmail to openclaw, google flags the activity as weird and suspend the account because of unusual activity. Many whose accounts got locked because of this and they thought it was because they connected it to antigravity use against the policy (which happened in some cases). We will still see google account suspensions, and that would keep making news. and it wont be because of antigravity usage.
The problem is that Google treats its customers as college kids who can be banned from a college maker lab for using too much 3D filament rather than entrepreneurs who are trusting their livelyhood to a service provider that promises to be reliable. If War Department uses too many Gemini tokens, do they cut them off, make them go through recertification process and permaban the next time around?
Which means that anyone serious about AI and not going local route should be using a provider with better reputation. I don't know if Alibaba, Z.ai or moonshots AI are also known for hair trigger responses, could be decent options for coding AI otherwise? If not, time to look for smaller providers with good reputation?
Complete risk to use google products like this with your real account. My youtube is still banned over uploading two clips of Dexter's Laboratory over 15 years ago.
Today I could have uploaded them fine, and let whoever owns the cartoon make money I was just a fan of the show.
this is the long-standing problem with using Google services. either they become deprecated and removed without notification, or they outright ban you for using tools as intended. either way, using Google tools for anything doesn't make business sense to anybody who's seen the history of this.
cool. now do something about the hundreds/thousands of people getting rate limited on Antigravity even after upgrading their plans, even on their $250 /month plan.
> to address violations of the Antigravity Terms of Service (ToS), specifically the use of 3rd party tools or proxies to access Antigravity resources and quotas
Translation: Google doesn’t want you using Gemini oauth with openclaw
I am sick and tired of companies forcing a shitty fork of vscode down my throat. If I am paying let me use your api how I wish to. Most people aren’t malicious and just want to use their own workflow.
Another recent concern on other posts here on HN is whether a private company should have veto power over the US government. Or, another way to look at it, whether the US government should be able to designate a company as a supply chain risk and ban them from most business in the host country.
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.
koolba|1 day ago
tjoff|1 day ago
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.
gman83|1 day ago
wnevets|20 hours ago
I would also avoid using the same credit card between accounts. I used a Venmo card for my chrome extension account as an extra layer of separation.
baby_souffle|1 day ago
As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence.
At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
jauntywundrkind|1 day ago
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
aprentic|1 day ago
I'm the customer, not the product.
jijji|1 day ago
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
HardCodedBias|1 day ago
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.
joe_the_user|1 day ago
TacticalCoder|1 day ago
I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...
> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk
There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.
And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.
rootnod3|1 day ago
cube00|1 day ago
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.
clickety_clack|1 day ago
oofbey|1 day ago
jijji|1 day ago
jascha_eng|1 day ago
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.
gruez|1 day ago
This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
NitpickLawyer|1 day ago
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.
agentifysh|15 hours ago
https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
notatoad|18 hours ago
If you want the discounted rates they offer in their monthly plans, then expect to follow the terms that discount is offered under.
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
Analemma_|1 day ago
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.
bluecalm|1 day ago
gck1|1 day ago
It's been 2 months since these bans have started, first Anthropic, then Google. And their wording is still so confusing that I can't get a simple answer to a simple question:
Is piggybacking on headless 'gemini-cli -p' or 'claude -p' a TOS violation? Because there's really no reason why you can't do exactly what these tools did that caused these two companies to start giving out bans.
Unless you're in for a very specific configuration of models for some niche concern, CLIs give you nearly exact same access to the backend that snatching an OAuth token from them does. They give you JSONL for stdin, JSONL for stdout, and if you spin up a local proxy, you even get the same exact API contract in responses that you get from public APIs.
In fact, I already built a small tool for myself that does exactly that, to allow usage of alternative harnesses I prefer. Once I release it to the public, will -p be banned too?
blainm|1 day ago
NewsaHackO|1 day ago
>Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.
Seems clear-cut to me.
unknown|18 hours ago
[deleted]
hsaliak|1 day ago
Anti Gravity I understand, they are subsidizing to promote a general IDE, but I dont understand constraining the generative AI backend that Gemini CLI hits.
Finally, it's unclear what's allowed and what's not if I purchase the API access from google cloud here https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/overvi...
The Apache License of this product at this point is rich. Just make it closed source and close the API reference. Why have it out there?
tempest_|1 day ago
To this day I cannot coax the gemini-cli to allow me to use the models they claim you have access to. Enabled all the preview stuff in cloud etc etc.
Still I mostly get 2.5 and rarely get 3 or 3.1 offered.
The gemini-cli repo is a shit show.
I can seem to access the new models using opencode, but am 429 rate limited almost immediately such that its like 5 minutes between calls.
isaachinman|21 hours ago
The fix is surprisingly straightforward: own your domain, use a provider that focuses on email, and keep your client separate from your provider. Standard IMAP means all three pieces are interchangeable. If one fails, swap it out.
(I work on Marco [0], an IMAP email client. The number of people looking to decouple from Gmail/Google has been growing steadily, definitely a current trend.)
[0] https://marcoapp.io
RyanShook|1 day ago
ToS change frequently and it’s not really fair to assume the user knows what is and is not correct use of tokens.
sheept|1 day ago
Like in a similar vein, Instagram sometimes randomly bans genuine users without appeal, probably because they deal with thousands more spam accounts that don't deserve a warning/appeals process.
[0] Like as Anthropic reported: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
solfox|1 day ago
g947o|5 hours ago
If you think about how people's entire Google accounts are getting banned without apparently violating any terms without the ability to talk to someone or appeal, this feels almost nothing.
sidewndr46|1 day ago
writeslowly|1 day ago
To be charitable, maybe they’re expecting AI agents to eventually start reading the ToS docs
Verdex|8 hours ago
So either scaling stops hard here pretty soon so that spending can stabilize or else the investors are going to be showing up asking for several pounds of flesh.
Suddenly 'dont get left behind, this is the worst these models will ever be' sounds a lot more like 'get locked in with a hyper giant that'll destroy your livelihood and not notice'.
Although who knows, maybe local models will be a thing (however when your dev team gets banned with no explanation and the next milestone is coming up somehow I don't expect that transition to go sufficiently quick).
narmiouh|1 day ago
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.
cube00|1 day ago
consumer451|1 day ago
WarmWash|1 day ago
TiredOfLife|12 hours ago
johnebgd|1 day ago
esskay|1 day ago
squeaky-clean|20 hours ago
meling|23 hours ago
This morning I asked Gemini to “save” its output to a local file. However it did more than that … it committed the file (along with several unrelated staged changes that was not ready to be committed) and even pushed the changes to GitHub. I’ve never asked any model to commit, let alone push… I’m not impressed; actually a bit disappointed that it would do this without any warning up front. This happened in Antigravity.
verdverm|21 hours ago
Or just don't give it the keys, this is my strategy. Put them in a box with specific tools and access.
See also The Lethal Trifecta
iepathos|1 day ago
fsalbrechter|1 day ago
Thorrez|1 day ago
> 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.
cogman10|1 day ago
ankit219|1 day ago
problem is google's security concerns. when people connect gmail to openclaw, google flags the activity as weird and suspend the account because of unusual activity. Many whose accounts got locked because of this and they thought it was because they connected it to antigravity use against the policy (which happened in some cases). We will still see google account suspensions, and that would keep making news. and it wont be because of antigravity usage.
sreekanth850|17 hours ago
NamlchakKhandro|20 hours ago
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
wiskinator|1 day ago
cat_plus_plus|1 day ago
Which means that anyone serious about AI and not going local route should be using a provider with better reputation. I don't know if Alibaba, Z.ai or moonshots AI are also known for hair trigger responses, could be decent options for coding AI otherwise? If not, time to look for smaller providers with good reputation?
sergiotapia|1 day ago
Today I could have uploaded them fine, and let whoever owns the cartoon make money I was just a fan of the show.
burgerone|23 hours ago
This comment resonated with me in particular.
verdverm|20 hours ago
MiscIdeaMaker99|1 day ago
gozzoo|1 day ago
oofbey|1 day ago
TiredOfLife|1 day ago
jijji|1 day ago
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
marcd35|1 day ago
https://discuss.ai.google.dev/c/antigravity/64
chaostheory|1 day ago
Translation: Google doesn’t want you using Gemini oauth with openclaw
unit149|11 hours ago
[deleted]
abhitriloki|15 hours ago
[deleted]
zero0529|1 day ago
xrd|1 day ago
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.