ElizaOS Founder: X’s Demand for High Licensing Fees to Unlock Accounts Constitutes Extortion

Shaw, the founder of ElizaOS, posted on Farcaster: "X contacted me, claiming that we violated certain terms of service, including selling data and distributing some content by bypassing API keys. We have never done this—never in the past, and never in the future. They directly cited my open-source code as the reason for the ban—but that code wasn’t even primarily written by me; it’s just a collection of pieces from other open-source projects."

Shaw wrote, "They said that if we pay $50,000 per month for an enterprise license, they would stop harassing us. Currently, we pay $1,000 per month for gold verification and $200 for a developer license. Why would switching to an enterprise account change my right to publish open-source code? This is outright extortion and should not be legal. I don’t want to be part of such a system; it goes completely against my principles. I am considering whether to take legal action."