There is no world in which it makes sense to take this risk. There are plenty of great alternatives where you don't have to worry about playing russian roulette with your entire online identity.
Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Europe. If you're forced to use Apple/Google for digital identification, playing around with your Google account and get it banned can have disproportional consequences. Suddenly you're locked out of all online government systems.
Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them.
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, algorithmic control what content you know exists, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of humans rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And a morality system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. This prevents them from revoking access, as the identity management is within nation state control vs big tech. You potentially have recourse with your government, you have no recourse with Google and Apple (current state). They may consume your identity for your benefit, but they may not control your digital identity. If a Big Tech company chooses to ban you, they should be required to provide you, at their cost, a copy of all of your data stored with them and report that they did so to a regulator.
I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so. The technical primitives exist and implementation is straightforward. Without a law, this will not change, there is no incentive for it to change.
The way the EU could implement this is to mandate only using identity providers can guarantee they will not revoke people's identities, and the only way to make that guarantee watertight is to mandate only identity providers based within the EU.
There are no guarantees unfortunately, just contracts (formal and informal) that can be broken and paths as to what happens when those contracts degrade or fail. Agree with you on mandating EU only idps for those who reside within the EU jurisdiction.
It is a very clear act of total betrayal for europan governments to use taxpayers money from Europeans, to invest into US mega-corporations that proxy-enslave Europeans. Lobbyists in Europe are getting rich right now.
Who gets the money shouldn't be your focus, it's that there's even talk of anyone building such a system at all that should be the focus.
Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
Banning the entire account rather than AI access is wildly user hostile. People have years of emails and calendars on their accounts.
And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
This feels like the sort of thing that needs to be legislated. Banning accounts after breaking ToS is a pretty common behavior across many companies. The fact a Google account ends up being used for multiple products makes it more interesting but the overall problem here is not unique to them.
Big companies are all becoming user hostile these days. They act like the customer is an inconvenience rather than a fundamental part of their business. Every interaction exudes this feeling that your primary role is to serve as an unwanted impediment to money flowing out of your bank account and into theirs.
Apart from the products not being very competitive this is the main reason I'm reluctant to use any Google models / AI products. The account is way to precious thing to lose based on some AI classifier misfiring and then you know there's good route to get it reenabled.
Same. The more of Google's services I touch, the more chance that some errant auto-moderation system will lock me out of Gmail and their support won't do anything about it. Better to not risk it, I don't even log in to YouTube.
Google made some noise awhile back about banning youtube accounts for using adblockers. I'm not sure if they went through with it but it just isn't worth the risk if you have a more important service the relies on google.
Sounds like a good reason to start eliminating your dependence on Gmail. You don't want to tie something as important as your E-mail identity to an account that you might get banned from.
This is exactly why I haven't used any of Google's AI stuff. Unlike other providers, I'm risking my email and internet service (GFiber!) to some capricious ban-happy whim you probably can't even appeal.
The larger issue here is the fact that access to an account can hold you hostage and impact your life in essential services.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
That would be one way to do it but the problem isn't confined to email. Losing an online identity means losing, in practical terms, access to a wide range of government services and regulatorily required filings.
Total bans are convenient for the big platform providers, but they are big enough to be regulated such that people don't lose access to everything, and that there are timely and responsive ways to challenge their decisions.
If the industry can't do that on its own, it's a job for the regulators.
I was a huge Gemini fan, and I think the model itself is still very good. But Antigravity is absolutely horrible. It routinely writes broken code and then ends up in a short term cycle of reverting and re-implementing.
It's so bad that I don't use it for writing code and certainly wouldn't even bother trying to get it to refactor anything. It's been relegated it to analysis and planning. It is excellent there.
I can't be the only one who find this a little inexplicable that a company with Google's resources is fumbling this so badly.
I don't get these model providers forcing people to use their (bad) software. I just downgraded my anthropic account because I can't stand the bugfest that is Claude. I won't even touch google for AI. Doesn't matter if your model is good if I have to use your software.
With open-weight models getting closer and closer to parity with frontier models for specific tasks (coding,etc) the frontier labs are trying to make moats via their software.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
> (from Twitter) ...My Google account too valuable to risk it impacted by Antigravity usage
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month and getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and it can take months something to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc. but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
I don't self host anymore, as it really is a pain, but use Fastmail instead (while my wife uses Protonmail). I would never rely on Google for, well, anything if I can help it.
I have been self hosting E-mail for close to 15 years now, and apart from the occasional and very rare delivery problem, it's not really a pain at all. Get a dedicated IP address not on a spam blacklist, don't spam, and it's pretty much set and forget. Well worth it to not have your very identity hanging off an account that you might one day be banned for for reasons you can't figure out.
I'm currently working on a harness and I just integrated Antigravity support through `agy`. I can't risk my main Google account getting banned so it looks like I'll be stopping this immediately. Yikes... and I was feeling good about 3.8 Flash too...
That reminds me the story about closing family wide Google accounts, because of a kid, whose account was managed by Google Family Link, was sending naked selfies to Gemini
Not taking a side, but I remember that too and had looked later.
That said, I deliberately don't trust any google services. Fastmail is great; you all should try it. Google capriciously bans accounts, so keep your email elsewhere.
There was that father who sent some naked pictures of his kid to a nurse for a consultation. Google flagged the account for CSAM and reported him to the authorities. Even after being cleared of all charges, Google refused to reinstate his account, so he lost his digital life.
Tried to use modern technology for the health of his son and was digitally executed for it.
I'm aware. Like I said, you're foolish to trust google. That said, the claim in the reddit post: that the ban spread across the entire gsuite account and also any account that used that device, is far more aggressive.
If there is any company that can "ban your account" which would result in big problems for you (because, for example, they host your E-mail which means you've just lost access to password recovery for every account you have) with no recourse or due process, you should seriously rethink your approach to your online life.
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
I don't understand why google are being like this. This is an opportunity to extend an olive branch to developers (like openai has) and a great way to get data around how people are actually making this model work for them regarding coding…
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
That's the reason I avoided ever logging into YouTube: if for some reason they decided that my real name is not my real name, due to the Google+ integration, I could lose access to more important things like Google Talk.
Nowadays, with a Google account being all but required to use a non-Apple smartphone, it's even worse.
I think an interesting side of this conversation is how the Google employees are jumping in with DARVO attacks, trying to accuse people of spreading misinformation when they're literally quoting the ToS.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
There have been cases in which friends or family of Google employees have gotten the Google Death Penalty. In those cases they were internally stonewalled about this for weeks. Google's risk department works like secret police[0] and I would not be surprised if there is internal disinformation about what the policies actually are in there too.
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
This is why I'm hesitant to buy Google AI again. I don't want to risk some npm install compromising my Google account which also happens to do AI coding.
Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
You can wrap claude code in a harness without -p, it works fine. I think most of the concern was that -p resubmits the entire chat history on each prompt which is really bad for kv caching, and when Anthropic announced that they were ok with 3rd party harnesses that DO use -p I think they had figured out the routing and caching for thinking token hash ids
It’s detectable and has been known to result in account bans. People have been doing it since the early days of Gemini, when the ToS was still unclear, and some only found out after their accounts were banned. There have been multiple GitHub issues and reports to Google about it. It’s not worth the effort unless you’re willing to risk a secondary Google account.
And if I am not mistaken, Theo’s T3Code (which was explicitly told was bad), doesn’t even use anything else than AI producer provider command line tools and use them with `-p`.
That line of reasoning has no end. If you use Antigravity on anything other than a Google Chromebook or Pixel, the hardware is a 'product not provided by them'. Is that a TOS violation?
Google still owns me a few $100 when they banned my watch only youtube red (premium at the time) account for community guideline violations which prevented me from even accessing payment page to stop / cancel. Had to do automated repeals limited every x weeks, couldn't risk charge back or changing credit card incase it fucked with rest of account. Made a separate account to grab my playlists and got banned again for same issue (again watch only accounts) and kept double charging as well. Appeals did nothing... interesting enough both accounts got unbanned like 2 years+ later.. out of blue. I surmise only because I appealed at the time so they made it through some backlog. I have 3rd gmail/youtube account on some generic side project email at the time unbeknownst to be also had youtube banned, literally never used it and only found out it was banned after going to youtube this year trying to post something side project related, and it cannot even be appealed, because it was banned so long ago. Sigh.
For reference, when my wechat account was blocked a few years ago, I got escalated to talking a real person and sorted everything out in a few days.
I've built a personal meta-harness on top of agy, cc, codex, kiro-cli, ollama that I use to schedule jobs, run oneshot tasks, etc. which provides a general API for my other personal apps that need to do some inference. For example, I built a personal trip app for an upcoming family vacation that uses the inference API to do things like research locations and plan routes, it basically just calls the various cli harness underneath, so it would look like i'm using them directly with their respective model.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
It's not clear what your full pipe is from your description, but if you're utilizing your Google Pro bundled quota via 3rd party tooling in any way, then you'd be vulnerable to consequences.
I also temporarily had agy as a harness in my orchestrated workflow until I learned about the account bans. IANAL but frontier models examining Google's TOS suggested my use could be in violation. Haven't touched agy for anything since.
The EU setup an entire EUID system on Google. Hopefully that'll help unlock some accounts since there may be an expectation to continue providing the service.
Can someone link the previous time this kerfuffle happened? That time it seemed like indeed we had misinterpreted, and that at that time they weren't banning accounts just cutting off AI access. But there were a lot of very good very real outraged comments condemning it, even though at the time it was not the policy.
But now! Oh man, the mechanization against humanity proceeding rapidly apace.
I completely understand the concern here, but the person linked is being dramatic and obtuse.
The terms seem to directly relate to your Google Antigravity account. Google has limited GCP suspensions to its cloud service, not your entire account. That is the same spirit of this TOS and what the head of Antigravity has clarified. The terms already make it clear that the context isn't your entire Google account. Misunderstanding the TOS is a silly reason to demand that Google change their TOS.
When confronted with this, the goalpost suddenly moves from "Getting banned from Antigravity bans your entire Google account" to "Getting banned from Antigravity has additional effects"; the only example they can provide is unsubstantiated third-party claims of losing access to Gemini CLI after getting suspended from Antigravity. This is nonsense because these tools are essentially the same thing, with Antigravity being the successor to Gemini CLI. It makes sense that if you get caught violating the TOS for their newer LLM service, you would get banned from all legacy iterations of that LLM service as well. That's hardly getting your entire Google account nuked...
I don't see what the big deal here is. If you want to use Antigravity, you are safe to do so. If you intend for the service to provide tokens to third-party applications, use API billing or face suspension of your Antigravity access for deliberately bypassing their locks and violating the TOS. Why is this unreasonable?
it's not really over dramatic, considering it's entirely plausible they'd just ban your whole account, it's not like it'd impact even 0.000001% of users, who cares about them
Also word of warning: don't buy Google AI subscription before you confirm you have "Antigravity entitlement" whatever that is.
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
Just google things. If you buy a monthly package, you pay next day, let's say on the 15th. Then they again pull the monthly amount on the 6th of next month. They pocket your money and the moment you have any issues, well, go F yourself. Everything is automated. They shove your arse out from any service they deem redundant or useless. They zero your data without recourse.
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
- Varun Mohan on the antigravity team
https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2095529407033000260
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, algorithmic control what content you know exists, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of humans rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And a morality system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
How should our collective values shape this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so. The technical primitives exist and implementation is straightforward. Without a law, this will not change, there is no incentive for it to change.
Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
Luckily I use a custom domain so accounts won't need to be updated, just emails exported and DNS changed.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
Ours sends revenue service notifications exclusively via email, a lossy system... and legally assumes you got it.
Total bans are convenient for the big platform providers, but they are big enough to be regulated such that people don't lose access to everything, and that there are timely and responsive ways to challenge their decisions.
If the industry can't do that on its own, it's a job for the regulators.
I don't appreciate but kinda understand that Anthropic can act arrogant with Fable. Google (shockingly) is really in no position for this.
I was a huge Gemini fan, and I think the model itself is still very good. But Antigravity is absolutely horrible. It routinely writes broken code and then ends up in a short term cycle of reverting and re-implementing.
It's so bad that I don't use it for writing code and certainly wouldn't even bother trying to get it to refactor anything. It's been relegated it to analysis and planning. It is excellent there.
I can't be the only one who find this a little inexplicable that a company with Google's resources is fumbling this so badly.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month and getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and it can take months something to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc. but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-account-bans-3654171...
Not taking a side, but I remember that too and had looked later.
That said, I deliberately don't trust any google services. Fastmail is great; you all should try it. Google capriciously bans accounts, so keep your email elsewhere.
Tried to use modern technology for the health of his son and was digitally executed for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
I don't care if my Claude or OpenAI account is banned, but risking a Google account is different.
1. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
I am also fairly confident that nobody sees the moderation decisions either.
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
Nowadays, with a Google account being all but required to use a non-Apple smartphone, it's even worse.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
they don't understand the concept of external users being a thing
that's the impression I've gotten
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
Is OpenAI the only one that allows this? Because Codex without codex is fantastic.
Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
Remember that this is a TOS, so you gotta presume that they will act as malicious as possible within the text.
For reference, when my wechat account was blocked a few years ago, I got escalated to talking a real person and sorted everything out in a few days.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
If I write my own harness, is that third party?
Insane policy
Why bother creating a CLI and OAuth interface if your ToS punishes for using it
If you register a new OAuth client and generate access tokens for it to call the API, then you are following the rules.
They un-banned him later, but that was enough to stay away. There are much better services than Antigravity out there.
But now! Oh man, the mechanization against humanity proceeding rapidly apace.
The terms seem to directly relate to your Google Antigravity account. Google has limited GCP suspensions to its cloud service, not your entire account. That is the same spirit of this TOS and what the head of Antigravity has clarified. The terms already make it clear that the context isn't your entire Google account. Misunderstanding the TOS is a silly reason to demand that Google change their TOS.
When confronted with this, the goalpost suddenly moves from "Getting banned from Antigravity bans your entire Google account" to "Getting banned from Antigravity has additional effects"; the only example they can provide is unsubstantiated third-party claims of losing access to Gemini CLI after getting suspended from Antigravity. This is nonsense because these tools are essentially the same thing, with Antigravity being the successor to Gemini CLI. It makes sense that if you get caught violating the TOS for their newer LLM service, you would get banned from all legacy iterations of that LLM service as well. That's hardly getting your entire Google account nuked...
I don't see what the big deal here is. If you want to use Antigravity, you are safe to do so. If you intend for the service to provide tokens to third-party applications, use API billing or face suspension of your Antigravity access for deliberately bypassing their locks and violating the TOS. Why is this unreasonable?
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
And their verification is some major AI slop that just doesn't work. This is open from June but this was already a bug in Gemini CLI before then: https://github.com/google-antigravity/antigravity-cli/issues...
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
What kind of "small joes" are training LLMs???