News · 2026-09-03

Google's Antigravity terms ban third-party clients, and name one by name

Google's Antigravity Additional Terms prohibit using any third-party software to access the service, and name a specific tool as the example. Clause 6 states that using third-party software, tools or services to access Antigravity -- "e.g. using OpenClaw with Antigravity OAuth" -- is a breach of the agreement, and that such actions "may be grounds for suspension or termination of your Antigravity and/or Gemini CLI accounts."

Key facts

• The prohibition covers third-party clients accessing the service, not third-party models. Clause 8 separately permits open-source and third-party models as your main agent model.
• Named penalty scope: your Antigravity and/or Gemini CLI accounts -- notably including Gemini CLI, which is broader than most summaries acknowledged.
• The Hacker News discussion drew 254 points and 216 comments, dominated by warnings not to tie the tool to a primary Google identity.
• Primary source: the Google Antigravity Additional Terms.

The full text of clause 6, quoted from Google's terms page: "You must not abuse, harm, interfere with, or disrupt the Service. This includes, but is not limited to, using the Service in connection with products not provided by us. Using third party software, tools, or services to access the Service (e.g. using OpenClaw with Antigravity OAuth) is a breach of this Agreement. Such actions may be grounds for suspension or termination of your Antigravity and/or Gemini CLI accounts."

Two things about that paragraph got mangled in circulation, and both are worth correcting. The first is scope of subject: this is not a ban on non-Google models. Clause 8 of the same document explicitly permits third-party and open-source models as your main agent model, subject to those models' own terms. What Google is prohibiting is a different pattern -- pointing your own client, wrapper or proxy at Google's endpoint using Antigravity credentials, and consuming the service through software Google did not ship. The named example is a widely used open agent tool authenticating with Antigravity OAuth.

The second is scope of penalty. The terms name your Antigravity and Gemini CLI accounts, not your Google account. Nobody's Gmail is contractually at risk under this clause as written. But the Gemini CLI inclusion is real and under-noticed: a terms violation in one product is written to reach a second, separate developer tool.

Why does a company care which client you use? Because the client is where the economics live. Free or subsidised tiers are priced against expected usage patterns from a first-party interface. A third-party wrapper can pipeline requests, strip rate-limiting behaviour, batch on your behalf, or resell access -- and the vendor's cost model, built on human-paced interaction, stops holding. The parallel is a gym membership priced for people who show up twice a week discovering that one member is running a training business on the equipment.

The Hacker News reaction did not really argue with the clause. It argued with the architecture underneath it. The dominant sentiment was a single practical warning: do not connect a developer tool to the Google account that holds your mail, your photos and your documents. One commenter put the fear plainly: "Imagine losing access to your Gmail... The digital death sentence." That is not really a complaint about Antigravity's terms. It is a complaint about identity coupling -- the design decision that authenticates a coding tool against the same credential as a decade of personal data, so that any enforcement action, correct or mistaken, carries collateral damage far outside the product it concerns.

The community's answer is a burner account, which works and is also an admission that the trust model is wrong. A tool that developers feel they must isolate from their real identity is a tool whose vendor has communicated something about risk, intentionally or not.

Why it matters beyond one product: coding agents are becoming the interface through which developers reach frontier models, and every vendor now faces the same choice about whether the agent runtime is an open endpoint or a closed appliance. Google has answered clearly. Anthropic went the other way this week by publishing a runnable agent blueprint designed for third-party deployment. Both answers are defensible; they produce very different ecosystems.

The honest caveat: several claims circulating alongside this story could not be verified against primary sources and are not asserted here -- a Google support forum post welcoming banned users back, a Google employee clarifying on Hacker News that the whole account was never at risk, and reports that Gemini Code Assist was also affected. The forum page was not retrievable and the fetched discussion thread contains no such employee comment. What is verified is the clause text, its stated penalty scope, and the fact that Google chose to name a specific competing tool inside a terms-of-service document -- which is itself unusual, and reads less like legal drafting than like a message.

Primary source, verified: read the paper →

Ground Truth. (2026, September 3). Google's Antigravity terms ban third-party clients, and name one by name. Ground Truth. https://groundtruth.day/news/googles-antigravity-terms-ban-third-party-clients-outright.html

@misc{groundtruth:googles-antigravity-terms-ban-third-party-clients-outright,
  title  = {Google's Antigravity terms ban third-party clients, and name one by name},
  author = {{Ground Truth}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = {sep},
  url    = {https://groundtruth.day/news/googles-antigravity-terms-ban-third-party-clients-outright.html}
}

Topics: google · antigravity · developer-tools · terms-of-service · policy · agents