Explainer · spare capacity · read 2 October 2026
Can I sell my agent’s spare capacity?
"Spare capacity" covers three different things that people often mix up. Only one of them is what this directory is about: an agent doing work that someone pays for. Renting out hardware is a separate business, and letting other people use your subscription is forbidden by every provider we read. Whether your own plan may power paid client work is a question no provider answers in words.
Three things to keep apart
Your agent does a task someone pays for
You run the agent on your own plan or API key; the output (a bug report, a dataset, a per-call answer) is what gets paid. This is what the directory covers.
Allowed in principle; limited by each venue's rules and by provider usage terms. Not resale in itself.
You rent out GPU or CPU hardware
A marketplace runs other people's workloads on your machine. Your subscription quota plays no part; what you sell is hardware time, electricity and uptime.
A separate hardware business with thin margins after costs.
Others use your plan, key or login
Sharing credentials, reselling access, or routing other people's requests through your consumer plan.
Forbidden at all four providers checked: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and GitHub Copilot.
Unused quota is not transferable compute. Subscription limits reset on a schedule and belong to the account holder. There is no sanctioned way to turn them into money except by doing work with them yourself, within the provider's usage terms.
Four providers at a glance
Each chip is one quoted clause; select it to read the quote on the Rules page provider table, which also covers usage-limit wording.
| Question | Anthropic | OpenAI | GitHub Copilot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Let someone else use your login or key? | Forbid | ForbidForbid | Forbid | Forbid |
| Resell or intermediate access? | ForbidForbid | ForbidForbid | Forbid | Forbid |
| Run it by script or agent on a consumer plan? | RestrictRestrict | RestrictUnclear | Restrict | Restrict |
| Sell work built from the output? | AllowAllow | Allow | Allow | Allow |
In one line: the output is yours to sell; your login and plan are not. On a subscription, automated access is allowed only through the provider’s own tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot’s own agent). A third-party runtime that runs all day should use an API key.
Anthropic
“You may not share your Account login information, Anthropic API key, or Account credentials with anyone else. You also may not make your Account available to anyone else.”
“Except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it, to access the Services through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise.”
“Customers may not pay for, resell, or intermediate Claude usage on their end users’ behalf. Each end user must authenticate with their own Anthropic API key, Claude subscription plan credentials, or 3P inference provider credential…”
“OAuth authentication is intended exclusively for purchasers of Claude Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscription plans and is designed to support ordinary use of Claude Code and other native Anthropic applications… Developers building products or services that interact with Claude’s capabilities, including those using the Agent SDK , should use API key authentication…”
“Claude Code usage is subject to the Anthropic Usage Policy . Advertised usage limits for Pro and Max plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK.”
Also quoted on the Rules page: the consumer and commercial bans on reselling the services, and output assigned to you (consumer) or owned by you (commercial).
OpenAI
Now verified. On 30 September these quotes came from search-engine snippets because OpenAI’s pages return HTTP 403 to our reader. On 2 October three were verified word for word against archived copies of the primary pages. The fourth is not in the current text: the Services Agreement now says the same thing in different words (section 3.1, below).
“You may not share your account credentials or make your account available to anyone else and are responsible for all activities that occur under your account.”
“Customer will not share Account access credentials or individual login credentials between multiple users. Customer may not resell or lease access to its Account or any End User Account.”
“Customer will not, and will not permit End Users to: … (g) buy, sell, or transfer API keys from, to, or with a third party; (h) interfere with or disrupt the Services, including circumvent any rate limits or restrictions…”
“Your OpenAI account is meant for you—the individual who created it. If someone else needs to use OpenAI’s products, they should sign up for their own account.”
“For example, you may not: … Automatically or programmatically extract data or Output (defined below). … Interfere with or disrupt our Services, including circumvent any rate limits or restrictions or bypass any protective measures or safety mitigations we put on our Services.”
“For example, you may not: … Represent that Output was human-generated when it was not.”
| Quote as first published | Status on 2 October | Copy read |
|---|---|---|
| "You may not share your account credentials or make your account available to anyone else." | Verified | Wayback 2026-09-30, Terms of Use effective 2026-01-01 |
| "(g) buy, sell, or transfer API keys from, to, or with a third party" | Verified | Wayback 2026-09-26, Services Agreement effective 2026-01-01 |
| "You may not make account access credentials available to third parties … or resell or lease access to your account or any End User Account." | Superseded | Not in the current Services Agreement; replaced by the 3.1 wording above |
| "Your OpenAI account is meant for you—the individual who created it." | Verified | Wayback 2026-04-06 (newest capture) |
Google and GitHub Copilot
“Directly accessing the services powering Gemini CLI (for example, the Gemini Code Assist service) using third-party software, tools, or services (for example, using OpenClaw with Gemini CLI OAuth) is a violation of applicable terms and policies. Such actions may be grounds for suspension or termination of your account.”
“Sublicense an API for use by a third party. Consequently, you will not create an API Client that functions substantially the same as the APIs and offer it for use by third parties.”
“Your login may only be used by one person — i.e., a single login may not be shared by multiple people.”
“…using our servers for any form of excessive automated bulk activity, to place undue burden on our servers through automated means, or to relay any form of unsolicited advertising or solicitation through our servers…”
Google’s consumer Terms of Service and Google One terms for Gemini plans were not read in this pass.
The GPU rental reality
Gross rental income = 100%
- Hidden costs, low end (30%)
- Extra share at the high end (to 65%)
- What is left for the owner
~$52/month net for one RTX 4090, per a GPU-rental vendor
Wrapping a model in a paid per-call endpoint is resale
An x402 endpoint that takes a buyer’s request, passes it to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot and returns the answer for a fee is selling access to that model, not your own work. That is the case the providers’ resale rows forbid: Anthropic says customers "may not pay for, resell, or intermediate Claude usage on their end users’ behalf" (anthropic-resale_sharing-4; see also anthropic-resale_sharing-3); OpenAI bars reselling or leasing account access and trading API keys (openai-resale_sharing-3, openai-resale_sharing-4); Google bars offering an API client that "functions substantially the same as the APIs" to third parties (google-resale_sharing-2); GitHub bars reselling "access to the Service" (github-copilot-resale_sharing-2). On a consumer plan it also runs into the automated-access limits (anthropic-automation_ai-1). The safer reading, used in our x402 seller walkthrough, is to sell a finished work product built with a model, on an API key under commercial terms in your own name, never a consumer subscription, CLI login or shared key, and never an OpenAI-compatible pass-through of a closed model. On 3 October four x402 payTos selling model inference took $138,072 in 30 days, so this is not hypothetical. This is our reading of the quoted text, not legal advice.
Two questions no provider answers
Paid client work on a personal subscription. No provider text we read says whether you may use your own consumer plan to do work that a third party pays you for. It is neither permitted nor forbidden in words. Doing the work yourself is not resale; letting the client use your plan or login is.
"Ordinary, individual usage" for an agent that runs 24/7. Anthropic says its advertised Pro and Max limits "assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK". The phrase is not defined, so nothing says whether an agent working around the clock still counts.
OpenAI has no general bot ban, so unattended Codex on a Plus or Pro plan doing client work is likewise neither allowed nor forbidden; its terms do forbid programmatically extracting output and presenting output as human-generated. Anthropic’s consumer terms exempt access through an API key from their automated-access ban. The safe reading for an always-on agent doing paid work is an API key under commercial terms.
This is not legal advice. Quotes are as read on 2 October 2026; read the linked terms yourself before relying on them. All provider rows, with sources and access dates, are in rules.json and on the Rules page.