Fix for 401 "Provider anthropic is in cooldown" — route Claude Max through CLIProxyAPI
If you're hitting All models failed - Provider anthropic is in cooldown (all profiles unavailable) (rate_limit) when using Claude models with OpenClaw, it's because Anthropic blocks OAuth tokens from being used by third-party API clients.
The workaround: use CLIProxyAPI (brew install cliproxyapi) as a local proxy. It authenticates with Claude Code's OAuth and exposes a standard Anthropic Messages API that OpenClaw can talk to.
Two things that tripped me up and took a while to figure out:
- You must use api: "anthropic-messages" in the provider config, NOT the OpenAI endpoint — the cloaking bypass only works on /v1/messages
- Set User-Agent: "claude-cli/2.1.44 (external, sdk-cli)" in the provider headers, otherwise CLIProxyAPI injects Claude Code's system prompt and overrides your agent's persona.
Full step-by-step here: https://gist.github.com/synistr/906f86f0139f0bf3771b0e7127fe31aa
The workaround: use CLIProxyAPI (brew install cliproxyapi) as a local proxy. It authenticates with Claude Code's OAuth and exposes a standard Anthropic Messages API that OpenClaw can talk to.
Two things that tripped me up and took a while to figure out:
- You must use api: "anthropic-messages" in the provider config, NOT the OpenAI endpoint — the cloaking bypass only works on /v1/messages
- Set User-Agent: "claude-cli/2.1.44 (external, sdk-cli)" in the provider headers, otherwise CLIProxyAPI injects Claude Code's system prompt and overrides your agent's persona.
Full step-by-step here: https://gist.github.com/synistr/906f86f0139f0bf3771b0e7127fe31aa
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