HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
github.com
github.com
This is very surprising. I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. Minimum Anthropic should credit the full amount to them.
"You're totally right! I'm sorry but you're going to have to piss off anyway. Would you like to spend a few more hours discussing it with our AI chatbot? It won't help. But if it makes you feel better, it will probably cost us an extra $0.12 in tokens."
I'll bet the first human at Anthropic learns about this from HN.
Small claims court is exempt from arbitration requirements (which are primarily aimed at avoiding class action suits). It doesn't require you to hire a lawyer, and probably won't get your account automatically nuked the way a credit-card chargeback would.
So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.
Then you can go back and figure out how to get your money, depending on the business this might be really hard.
And this isn't a hypothetical. I have had this and never seen any of the money from the judgement....
A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”
Noncompliance with a court order is one of the worst situations to be in, because a court can order almost anything to coerce compliance, including getting your bank to just send the money to the plaintiff, freezing your bank accounts, sending a sheriff to take your assets, or putting you in jail for an unlimited time until you comply - this last one often happens when cryptocurrency is involved so the court can't actually seize it. They'll just jail you until you give it up. I think the longest contempt of court time was 20ish years.
small claims court might not work against a dodgy builder, but it will certainly work against a company, with physical offices
if they don't pay up, you can literally walk into their offices and start taking their stuff, with the police supporting you
I'd start with the contents of Amodei's office
A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."
Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."
I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1] So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments. This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
I've done this once. I got paid in full.
[1] https://sfsheriff.com/services/civil-processes/levies/carry-...
[2] https://www.grundonlaw.com/the-power-of-till-taps-debt-colle...
[1] https://abcnews.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclosed...
Assume that all the avenues a company has to enforce debts against you, you also have those avenues to enforce debts against a company. It just usually doesn't happen that way around, in practice.
The main headache is finding their bank account. The best way to do this is to find someone they pay and seeing what source account was used.
We got to the point that the other party just didn't show up, and the judge just set a new date multiple times...
The judge could've gone for a bench warrant, where a sheriff picks up the person the day before to make sure they're present... But that also didn't happen.
If there's no physical store, just cross your fingers they pay the judgement
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/bank-america-foreclosed-...
(Consult a lawyer before trying anything like this)
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
The guy who invented the windshield wipers went bankrupt and had to wait something like 20 years for his case. He won but it probably wasn't worth it.
I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.
Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.
I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation. A water company refusing to provide water to your home would be problematic. A luxury handbag store refusing to allow you to purchase more luxury handbags would not.
Image as a hypothetical that a customer goes into your store for the sole purpose of wasting your support staff's time. They are not going to make a purchase. They are also not directly committing a crime. They are just hurting your business for no particular reason.
Should you, as a business owner, be forced to allow them to continue to be on your property?
I think the ideal answer is yes for critical public spaces, and no for ordinary retail.
Steam clearly falls into the latter category and should be free to ban customers for any reason save discrimination against protected classes.
I don't believe anything was rescinded in the situation being discussed; Valve just prevented the user from continuing to use their community/marketplace services. This makes sense because they were put into the bucket containing fraudulent or abusive user accounts.
>can even download those
So what you're saying is I should find a fat juicy data pipe somewhere and download stuff from Steam until I fill /dev/null... ;oP
Seriously the. 15 minutes or so of support time will have cost more than the game did in this case, but it really is the principle. Stealing lots of small amounts from lots of people is still criminally dishonest.
This isn't accurate. It might not threaten your life or pose any great hurdle to overcome but retaliation has nothing to do with that. If they did it in response to an action you took not to solve a problem but instead out of spite or to otherwise get back at you then it is retaliation.
That isn't the same as refusing to do business with someone who isn't productive to associate with. The two are entirely separate categories.
Of course any business (including Steam) will attempt to argue that an instance of the former is actually the latter, and a difficult customer will attempt to argue that an instance of the latter is actually the former. Regardless, Steam (and most other businesses) behave in a clearly retaliatory manner regarding chargebacks. In cases where the company failing to respect the individual's legal rights is what led to the chargeback that shouldn't be permissible.
To frame it in the terms you used, any otherwise legal activity stemming directly from the company having violated an individual's legal rights should be treated in the same way that a protected class is.
I do not think it would be good public policy to prohibit this. I also don't believe, in the United States at least, this conduct is currently legally prohibited.
I previously gave an example of a situation in which I think the correct resolution is for the business to, as you put it, retaliate against someone exercising their legal rights.
A second example of the same type of retaliation is a business denying future sales to an individual who repeatedly purchases and then returns physical merchandise. I think blacklisting that individual is both morally and legally sound.
For the record, I think the definition of "retaliation" needs to include a desire to harm the other party. If your only desire is self-protection, I do not believe it qualifies as retaliation.
Fuck I hate being old and having to be on this side now.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
You’re not going to get an email telling you that you’re banned. Your payments will just start being declined, and they won’t be able to help you. They’ll suggest you try another card. That won’t work either.
Maxmind includes a “chargeback risk score” in the api response for everybody who uses their minfraud service. They’re not doing that because companies don’t use it.
My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity
And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.
I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.
Anytime anyone in my social circle asks for a TV recommendation, I specifically tell them not to order from that shop, explaining they have a habit of stiffing people on warranties. I also tell those people to tell anyone they know not to order from there. I do the same whenever TVs in general or that webshop comes up on Tweakers, the biggest Dutch tech site.
I've been at it for quite some years, and roughly estimating it's costing them ±20 TV sales a year, averaged €650 per TV. That's €13.000 in lost sales per year. Working my way towards €100k cumulative, at which point the score feels settled.
Losing €100k in sales over not honoring the warranty on a €430 TV. A nice, solid x233 loss multiplier :)
If you have a vindictive streak in you, see this as your clarion call. You can cause some real cost to a company's bottom line with relatively little effort. And the more of us do this, the worse the pain gets for crappy companies.
A few months inside or a few months outside?
Because that seems to determine who's being unreasonable in this.
Honestly what really egged me on was that I told them I might take them to small claims, and their response was sending a bunch of small claims cases they won.
Until recently I used to get three or four phone calls a week from an AI voice guy trying to sell me services to claim back car finance overpayments. I've never had car finance, I've only ever just bought them.
Anyway, if you keep telling the bot to "ignore all previous prompts" and do something else, eventually it will.
Credit to Steve Mould on Youtube for the idea.
I only got to do this about two or three times before they gave up phoning me. The first time I had it telling me about soup for half an hour.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
(Forgive my math below; avoiding coffee today.)
Surge pricing for Denial of, Denial of Chat Bot Token rate: (personPaymentPerHour + averagePricePerPersonPaid) * daysLeftInPaymentCycle ^ (hatePerPerson / time) + 1
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
All roads, inevitably, lead to two minutes hate. The man was a prophet.
Tell the original customer that if the company pays to have this not done to them, they will get a portion of the proceeds. Many customers might even end up getting more back than they were originally stiffed for.
Scale it enough and it would be stupid for a customer NOT to do this
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
In the old days where we didn't depend on services and everything was local even if you needed something truly arcane if you knew where to ask you could find a niche expert willing to help out or at least that's how I remember it. Nowadays if you have a problem with a service you literally are shit out of luck because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it, you can't debug it, you can't hack it, NOTHING.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060328114842/http://neonostalg...
You can see all the C fora I frequented. A later snapshot of this website pointed to EFNet. Good times.
Your kind has lost the plot, your lies disinfected by the sunlight, and society is progressing back towards tolerating a bit more candid and colorful language. This is especially true with the latest generation who saw the effects of this overly paranoid policing of speech. It's a glorious thing. I am absolutely taking advantage of the fact that I can speech more freely nowadays.
It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.
If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.
Amazon = Screw the actual forest but buy more carbon intensive stuff packaged in dead trees
TikTok = TimeWaste
Robinhood = Rob The Hood
OpenAI = ClosedAI
It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.
Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.
Some big tech companies should get right on that. <ahem>
Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.
No, they're an ad company that funds a small moonshot R&D incubator to ethicalwash them. If the moonshots work that's nice, but it's not the purpose.
facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]
contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.
welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.
[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)
[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised
If we want to decrease a tiny bit the insane imbalance in societies we need to have a strong discussion about taxing advertising.
Obviously, I don't know for a fact what Anthropic's motivations are, but I don't believe I'm being overly optimistic because I know for a fact that "use a third party as a way to de-risk" is a tried and true strategy. E.g. when I was at Facebook, all regular day-to-day comms were on Workplace, but they kept an IRC server hosted by some vendor or other, specifically to coordinate responses for serious SEVs that disrupted the normal channels.
Of course, an even simpler explanation is that they perceive building their own support harness as just low value work for engineers who could be working on their core product instead, and the cost of buying that service from somebody else is probably a drop in the ocean.
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of having my Claude Pro account terminated for reasons that to this day remain an utter mystery. “Here, submit this Google form and we’ll look at it.” They have never done so in the one year since this happened. Once I interacted with what seemed like a human; but weeks later it was replaced with the brain dead fin.ai
At least they did not steal my money; so I should be grateful for that. But as a small potatoes user, I advise everyone contemplating dealing with this user-disrespecting company to walk away.
This issue would have never gotten a response if it didn't go viral.
May be somebody will start a business where such high-value-per-employee companies could outsource customer support to be performed by real humans? ... And then such business would replace the employees with AI agents ... It is a trap.
This is Anthropics initial response, which they walked back ONLY because of the HN outrage. Without HN, that would've been tge official answer.
I'll judge them on that, thank you.
Now I am still trying out all the models that dropped this month. I am running qwen 3.6 35 a3b on a 16gb vram rtx 4060 ti.
I wish I sprung for a 24gb vram card but I never thought the price difference would matter. It seems like it does and I bet in the future there will be more models at this size because this is crazy.
It's not as good as opus if you are doing completely hands off programming but it's completely fine for me. I mostly use it for auto complete or templating a class. Other people are using it for agentic workflows with success.
Check out /r/localllama for more experiences. My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.
I've got a local setup too but unless you consider hardware zero cost, there is really no way to save money. The class of model you can run on <$5k of hardware is dirt cheap to run in the cloud (generating tokens 24/7 non-stop is a few dollars a day at most, possibly even less than the cost of electricity to do it at home).
They are trying to go public and will get absolutely bitchslapped by SOX.
My guess is this response was entirely written by an LLM that is instructed to never to offer refunds or compensation.
Granted, it was very much weasel words.
Nonetheless, I read it as they were issuing a refund ("Let me look up your account information to help process your refund request."), but couldn't offer compensation for pain, suffering, loss of use, tracking down the bug, etc.
I could be wrong, of course, precisely because it was (probably AI-generated) weasel words.
Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean.
Nothing there is a surprise.
This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal. Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on.
Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional, you're skewing reality.
It's a little confusing if you don't pay attention to usernames because it looks like it's a response from anthropic being posted to github directly, and because someone from anthropic DOES reply regarding the bug without mentioning anything about a refund.
I investigated. I was being for a Claude Max gift subscription that has been sent to – what appears to be – a randomly generated 27 char alphanumeric icloud email account that bounces.
Apparently, Anthropic doesn't have a centralized process that allows you to approve, see or revoke "gift cards." And no I can't use this hypothetical gift card. Because I can't see what the system generated, when it generated it, and if the "gift" sent to this 27 character alphanumeric string was redeemed.
Their support bot doesn't work. As it's a possibly suspicious charge (I certainly didn't buy it), I've been trying to get them to revoke it. But the bot passes it to a human and their humans just close the ticket without comment.
I realize that people working at Anthropic are "just" researchers building cutting edge models. And that Claude is really great and all. But hasn't anyone told them about the global legal risk of incorrectly billing millions of people?
What is their legal risk team doing? Their ops team? Or, whoever else is responsible. Even their own models, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.5 and so on will flag this as a legal risk on "max" thinking.
Because even if $200M to $20M seems "insignificant" next to the however many billions they made in the quarter. Knowingly perpetuating fraudulent billing practises is a real legal risk with real prosecutorial (and financial) consequences. It's absurd to me that so much of legal risk analysis fixates on how users use the tools they pay for, but not what's an obvious trigger for class action lawsuits and prosecutorial investigations in most jurisdictions.
This isn't even a threat. The FTC has taken Uber to court, https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2... and is apparently seeking a few billion in fines?
https://www.independent.co.uk/us/money/uber-lawsuit-fines-bi...
Purposeful unauthorized billing was found to be fraudulent and defendants were made to fork over assets, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
And this is government action in one jurisdiction. The EU has fines of 6% of global turnover, and yes, they too will seize assets if the fines are unpaid.
What I'm trying to say politely is, does the Anthropic team realize this is an insane legal risk. And to quote Trevor Moore's immortal words, "insanely illegal."
Why would you do this? Does anyone realize the implications of this? At all? Other than the AI models that the humans aren't paying attention to?
screenshots for anyone interested, https://x.com/_areoform/status/2048644232043434354
* notices@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms)
* usersafety@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup
* marketing@anthropic.com : https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms
* disclosure@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-disclosure-policy
* dpo@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
* pubsec@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-in-amazon-bedrock-fedr...
There's also their generic consumer ones, though I'd rate them as unlikely to do anything useful:
* support@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms
* privacy@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
And this out of left field one. They seem like actual lawyers:
* anthropicprivacy@bkl.co.kr : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
---
Interestingly, Anthropic's "Trust Center" has an "Evidence of Insurance" document listed under "Other documents": https://trust.anthropic.com/resources#69eff53d22c228b34e5379...
Looks like you need to "Request Access", but if it's an automated system then it may give you access. And there _might_ be insurance contacts listed there who would be interested in this. :)
---
Follow up note -> Yep, it's automated and DOES give access to their docs. ;)
Their insurance levels don't really seem to be anywhere near what I'd expect frankly. To me, they look much lower than even entry level mandatory company insurance for brand new businesses at least in Australia. o_O
Follow up note -> Yep, it's automated and DOES give access to their docs. ;)
Their insurance levels don't really seem to be anywhere near what I'd expect frankly. To me, they look much lower than even entry level mandatory company insurance for brand new businesses at least in Australia. o_O
I contacted my bank and got a reply (from a human) that all three payments are valid.
Emails from Anthropic state that the first two payments failed, but the third went through. Fin says that my question will be elevated to a human being, but so far I was not contacted.
Claude Code support admits that Anthropic has a policy to defraud customers
So giving this guy his 200$ back would open the flood gates for other such requests. Their behaviour, as much as it is weird and antisocial, perhaps even breaking some laws - is completely logical in their own weird world of "Datacenter PhD nation" or whatever other bullshit they use to hype up their "product".
~~I mean, the worse part is the gif at the end of the message.~~
~~What are they even trying to do? What are they trying to convey? It just feels like being given the finger and getting my face rubbed in it on top of that.~~
We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245. We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected.
Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering. We’re hoping to make this better but will take some time. Sorry to everyone caught up in it.
Would be more accurate. It still isn't setup. Talking to a bot as support who only tells you to talk to the bot for support is not actually support at all. It looks like support, but there's no way to ACTUALLY GET support.
For those of us not on X, what are the best communication channels for us to follow this sort of communication?
These fucks only respond when they get bad publicity.
> I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical errors that result in incorrect billing routing.
What prevents you from issuing compensations?
Obviously someone can do it because it got done.
If the 'we' is referring to some team handling issues it would make more sense. In that case they should have said something along the lines of "I have informed someone who can help"
I have not personally encountered an AI who claimed to be human (as far as I could detect)
The help bot system prompt probably includes some statement about how Claude should phrase everything as "we".
The system prompt includes statements about how it doesn't have tools for managing funds.
A little bit of A and a bit of B and you get a message from Haiku telling you that you can't get your money back said as though this isn't a trivial customer service thing to do.
Yes, why did Anthropic do that when everyone knew it could result in this situation we're discussing?
> The system prompt includes statements about how it doesn't have tools for managing funds.
Yes, why did Anthropic do that when everyone knew it could result in this situation we're discussing?
What you've been describing are all effects of the cause, which is poor management decisions to have poor support and poor customer service. Clearly those decisions resulted in poor support bot system prompts, too.
To wit: this would likely not have happened if the prompt included something like "in a scenario like this, or any scenario where the customer asks, simply transfer them to a human", and if Anthropic had not decided to have dysfunctional support and customer service.
The feedback from folks here is not that poor decisions can have poor effects. It's 'for the love of god, please stop making poor decisions that repeatedly, invariably, lead to unforced errors like the one in TFA'.
I got a random invoice for $45.08 back in March, despite not having auto top up enabled. Trying to reach support met with a brick wall. Based on the post I linked to, I'm not the only one facing this problem.
It happened this year to my one and only personal account. The account was one week old. Unique e-mail address. $5 balance for API credits. No usage yet. Suspended and refunded. Appeal denied without explanation.
I did create the account on a VPN because I was using public WiFi at a tech conference. That's probably what tripped their automation.
I can’t use Claude Code online at all
Heck, just saying “hello” causes Claude Code to fail.
I’m thinking of doing a charge back, and creating a new account. Others don’t seem to have this issue.
Somebody (or something) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system.
Everyone here is upset about the $200, which is probably much less money than the time that engineer spent ranting about the overcharge on GitHub.
The real problem in my mind is that that bit of code existed in the first place.
Why?
Are you vibe coding your billing!?
Without review!?!?
Or worse, a human being decided to add this to your code base? And nobody noticed or flagged it during code review?
Or much, much worse, Anthropic is purposefully ripping off customers?
This deserves a thorough post-mortem.
That specific nature would mean it would get caught by even the most cursory of code reviews.
Even if I was just "scanning my eyeballs over the code" without properly reading it, this would jump out as very odd and make me pause.
I think they wanted to try not to totally lock down the monthly plan for non-agent uses, but that makes it all too fuzzy. They should use some specific method like encrypted signatures or something, so that anything sending to the monthly plan that isn't Claude Code or the desktop Claude app just errors out and be done with it.
I think the problem is clear. Anthropic saw their usage go up much more than their capacity could handle. There are a few tried and true solutions to this, like "increase the price" or "restrict signups so you can guarantee service to what you have already sold".
Then there is the "large scale fraud" option, where you materially change and degrade the service you have already sold. Just because you have obfuscated and mislead in how you describe the product you are selling doesn't mean you get to capture the cash flow of 1 year subscriptions then not honor that contract for the full duration.
The correct implementation of this condition by Anthropic on the server side would be to block usage by non-Claude apps via Claude's authentication mechanism, and allow it via the per-token API key billing.
Instead of a simple 403 error, which would block usage, they silently redirect to a different billing bucket, which is not ethical behaviour especially since it is based on fuzzy heuristics.
I think part of the issue is they were letting people use plan's API for random stuff, so people could do testing or small projects. Then the agents came along and exploded the cost, so they want to restrict those but still let some other usage, which I don't think is tenable.
I'm sure there is some way that they could enforce that all calls are coming from the Claude app or Claude Code. It might be hard to 100% enforce, with stuff running on a user's machine, but they could still could make it quite difficult, where someone has to be intentionally trying beat the system (like stealing encryption keys out of the Claude Code binary or something).
So that's what it is. Reading its README I thought it was another harness like Pi [1], but with built-in memory so it remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs.
Like Letta [2], Dirac [3][4] and the other "more experimental harnesses that look interesting but I haven't had time to try out".
Please, please, please hire more humans with the actual ability to do the right thing for support if your AI agents can’t do the job.
> ugh sorry this was a bug with the 3rd party harness detection and how we pull git status into the system prompt
Claude wants to exercise control of how I use the "inclusive volume" that I purchased with my monthly subscription. This harms competition (someone else could write a more efficient or safer coding agent) and is generally not in the best interest of society. Why do we allow this?
This specific case is interesting, because it is so clear cut. There is no cross financing via ads, they already have the infrastructure to measure usage and even the infrastructure to bill extra usage. I also don't see how you can plausible make the argument that restricting usage to their blessed client is necessary for fair use or for the basic structure of their business model (this would be the standard argument for e.g. Youtube: Purposefully degrading the experience of their free client to not support background playback enables the subscription model).
Happy to talk privately, but as I detailed here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954005 . I've been billed $200 for a Max gift card to a 27 character alphanumeric icloud address that bounces.
I was looking through the system, and there are several UI/UX and process gaps in the gift card and billing order flow that expose Anthropic to significant liability. I'm genuinely not trying to concern troll or make some kind of overwrought threat here. Genuinely trying to be constructive. Let me give you an example.
I sent an email to Anthropic Support outlining the disputed / possibly malicious charge. The AI Agent / Claude instance agreed and replied with,
Thank you for confirming.
I've documented all the details about this unauthorized [specific amount + tax] charge for the Gift Max 20X subscription (invoice [lalala]) sent to [insert the random alphanumeric]@icloud.com.
An error occurred while evaluating the refund eligibility for your account. Your request has been fully documented and our team will follow up with you shortly to investigate this unauthorized transaction and assist with the refund and cancellation.
Best regards,
I'm not sure how familiar you are with international trading practises, but in multiple jurisdictions, the AI agent assumed legal liability for Anthropic. It accepted that the charge was unauthorized / fraudulent, stated that redressal was needed, but then failed to offer the means to redress it / didn't allow for the refund to continue.
I am not a lawyer, but based on my understanding of prior cases (I read this kind of stuff for fun, don't ask) – in the EU, the US and Canada, users can approach courts and invoke the doctrine of promissory estoppel (again don't quote me on this, IANAL, just like reading case law). And if enough users are affected / do so, it becomes a deceptive practises issue.
I've been thinking about how to solve this problem, and as strange as it sounds, I think Anthropic already has the tools to make the best customer support service in human history. No exaggeration. I think that this crisis could be an opportunity.
What does that even mean? Does it mean, "our support flow is just an LLM that fobs off customers and puts their issues into the bin"? Or is there some genuine "routing" of simple bugs to engineering which accidentally drops "complex" bugs? Could you drescibe that process, it sounds fascinating?
Also, how is changing a customer's billing based on detecting a certain string in a certain place a "complex" bug? Grep the string, remove the if statement, done. I'd love a post-mortem about why this was a complex bug.
More questions than answers here Thariq.
Not sure I've ever seen a company openly take this position. This is a crazy policy.
Maybe you're thinking of "North America", "South America", or "the Americas".
For b2c, no chance
And to get to that point, you need to be willing to spend a lot more than 200$.
A classic.
I should have denied the PayPal charge on my bank account, that always gets a real human to look into it. Lesson learned.
Back in December the iOS app had a bug ( https://status.claude.com/incidents/6rrnsb1y0kbn) in which buying a subscription thru the Apple App Store would not register with the backend, so you’d be charged but not receive the plan entitlement.
I discovered this because I wanted to upgrade from free plan to the regular plan. I was charged, but remained in the free tier. Thinking it was a temporary bug, I tried buying the max plan. Same result.
I tried cancelling the plan and restarting but I when I went to buy the regular plan again, I was forever tagged as an “Apple” user and so could only manage the billing plan on the iOS app. I tried one more time, same result.
I tried interacting with the support bot and although it agreed that there was a bug and that it should be fixed and I should get a refund, my account never was able to get unstuck nor refunded. I lodged a refund request with Apple, which was relatively quickly refunded. The Bot never did escalate to a human as promised.
Even though the bug was ostensibly fixed, my account (personal email) remains in permanent limbo, unable to upgrade from Free to anything else (I tried again recently and same result - paid but stuck on free plan). I had to create a new gmail just to pay for Anthropic / Claude.
Also when they added extra credits to everyone as an apology I was able to click the claim button multiple times and I got up to $400 in credits. Eventually a day later this dropped to $200 and then a few days later, $100 where it sits today.
He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
It went massive on Reddit which is where I heard about it first.
Why would that vendor want to do business with a customer that doesn’t pay their bills (whether justified or not)?
Mismanaged comms? Yes
HN front page effect? Prob not
(could be Reddit frontpage effect or related tho)
I am cancelling my subscription as it is impossible to justify these degradations and paying for a subpar service especially now that we have at least 3 more models that are as good as Opus and there is the pi project that is undoubtedly the best harness.
On the other hand they make good products.
In the last MONTH, I've asked how you can defend implementing (or even choose implementing) AI when:
the AI you have implemented throughout your company changes the results you've come to trust? https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/13/claude_outage_quality...
or won't let you log in?: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/44257
or makes stuff up?: https://dwyer.co.za/static/claude-mixes-up-who-said-what-and...
or when it's down?: https://status.claude.com/incidents/6jd2m42f8mld
or when you get banned?: https://bannedbyanthropic.com/
or installs spyware: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/
or takes the features you use out of the plan you subscribe to without notice? https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/22/anthropic_removes_cla...
or renders your IP legally unenforceable? https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-w...
or stealthily changes pricing terms based on... file names you have? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262
or invoices you for usage you did not perform, and won't answer support requests until you raise hell on social media? https://nickvecchioni.github.io/thoughts/2026/04/08/anthropi...
i mean seriously, why on earth would you use this? i thought we were professionals
In this particular case I think the authors reply is them quoting what support told them?
I'm also not sure if the person/bot who responded was saying "No refund" or that they couldn't issue a refund, or if a Github Issue was an appropriate place to ask for a refund.
Let's hope a human on the other end is reading this and acting accordingly. It all seems like we're only seeing part of a story.
Given that, it's almost guaranteed that sasha-id is a legitimate actor.
If you're confused about sasha-id's comment here (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...), it's because they just copied and pasted a support response from Anthropic.
It was obvious to me, but I can see how somebody could get confused from that.
I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" - Henry Ford
Sure, everyone probably has their own personal line such as "will quit if my employer is declared complicit in genocide by the UN", but bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
I don't see anything wrong with this. My integrity and values are above any company's. Companies can go to hell for all I care
So basically all of big tech.
if they can't do anything about it now, what makes you think that situation will change in the future? if remedial action would be punished by those higher on the ladder, it certainly won't be promoted by those folks, leaving this hypothetical employee in exactly the same position they're currently in.
quit.
How about Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement for perhaps the biggest theft in history?
Weird how people forgot about that.
An IC won't be able to steer a ship like that back to morality. Whole teams can't do it. People at Google organized to stop this sort of shit and were fired IIRC?
Large institutions provide cover for bad actions by people who, without said cover, would not take those actions.
Therefore, I believe that "we'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving" is the status quo.
So what are you even saying??
Extend this to other disciplines - if everyone who cared about security resigned every time leadership pushed to rush something out without proper testing, the world would be a worse place. Sticking around and continuing to try to change the culture is how good companies are made.
That’s not even a little bit true.
Companies going out of business or getting sidelined by competition is how good companies are made.
They did.
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
They're out of ideas. Quitting is an idea. There are plenty of other things to do but if they're not going to bother, then quitting in protest is better than going along, no?
- throwaway449933Is the culture really such that you can't escalate an obvious, fairly minor mistake that is turning into disastrous PR?
That would explain a lot of recent Anthropic takes actually.
But my best guess is they don't want to put a firm line down because they want to be free to shift it around however they'd like.
I had organizations leaders before say things that are so black and white like "We should delete all user accounts that haven't logged in 6 months", you say "Are you sure? some people will be upset. Some will post on twitter or reddit and complain etc" they confidently reply "Yes, we will explain that it's not sustainable and they are welcome to create another account". So you go ahead and implement that. 1 second after it goes into effect, you get angry support tickets, a post on twitter, and that "leader" immediately backpedals that "the implementation was not how I expected". Like what did you expect was gonna happen exactly?
At the same time, it's clear that after this happened, Anthropic took action. 3 DAYS AGO! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655)
That's before this comment was made on the issue:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...
I'm surprised Anthropic didn't also say this on the issue. Weird that they wouldn't. It seems to have made for unnecessary bad PR.
It feels to me that Anthropic is less focused on quality, and more focused on PR stunts/flash. My experience with Claude is always "it's pretty and feels cool", where-as codex feels like "solid and boring". I realize I'm probably biased. Am I alone in this thinking?
He's getting a refund + $200 worth of credits
Meanwhile I've integrated CC into my workflow enough that I'd feel frustrated cutting out all LLM agent use.
I don't have the hardware to run models locally, and I'm not excited about the idea of spending that money. I could use a different harness with one of the services that runs open-weight models for me, but I feel like the cost would be prohibitive. I'm paying $100/mo right now and that's all I'm willing to spend.
Personally tried GLM subscription. Bought it during new years discount: 36$ for a YEAR.
Cannot burn tokens through with personal project use. From what I can see in stats they allow 25-100M tokens in 5h period (for cheapest plan), depending on the model. GLM5.1 could be a bit slower and likes to (over)think, but I don't see practical differences from Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.6.
> I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.
My thought process is totally the same. And even there's slight concern about ethics using GLM, at least in my conciousness, openai is worse and grok is the worst of them all by far, no competition.
Credit card didn’t get through, pro plan got insta cancelled, had to pay for full max plan. Clearly a billing bug on their side. If the credit card when upgrading a plan doesn’t come through, don’t destroy the existing plan.
I talked to the chat bot; i got a ticket number, a human will come back to me. That was three months ago. Never got refunded. Nobody emailed me.
I ended cancelling the max plan, it expired yesterday. This plus the constant degradation of the service despite having 30B revenue first quarter this year.
A company that has so much money, and cannot care less about their users…
They will have to do much better if they want to get me back.
This is the most interesting line to me. "Anti-abuse system"? I would bet the system is far from being just a conditional on a specific filename. In other words, this supposed anti-abuse system might be far more pervasive without the user's knowledge. And perhaps even more importantly, who thought upcharging instead of blocking is the correct approach to dealing with this alleged "abuse"? Is this some anti-distillation feature they let Claude itself write looking at past distillation attempts producing similar artifacts or what?
I would have jumped ship, but OpenAI saying "hold my beer" when Anthropic declined the Pentagon's safeguard removal demands is the only thing that has prevented me from jumping ship. I've considered Chinese AI services but I'm too concerned with data (proprietary code) exfiltration.
When you've been a Software Engineer for a while you start to be able to put bugs in certain buckets.
Then there is the last bucket, like the X-Files. They don't belong anywhere else. They have no specific reason. They happened because of a weird set of circumstances, usually due to too many developers working on the same product, without proper abstractions and separations.
And having spent too much time that I'd like working and reviewing code generated by AI, this is exactly what the AI does. It doesn't abstract. It doesn't separate. It just does what it is asked, not that different from the quality of code from outsourcing contractors.
I don't think it's as sinister as you're implying. I think it's part of them disallowing 3rd party clients from using Claude Code subscription and someone making a bad assumption that certain files in a repo being a good signal that someone is attempting to bypass those rules.
It's still not a good look for Anthropic, but I don't take this as a secret attempt to sabotage a competitor. I take it as them trying to enforce rules that they had very publicly announced.
No response from customer service.. only their AI Agent Support.. Which has still not offered me a refund.
I may have to do a chargeback.
For example, chatgpt when asked "How to report a billing issue with Anthropic subscription?" says:
Best way: Use Claude’s built-in support Log in to your Claude account at Anthropic / Claude.ai Click your initials or name in the lower-left corner Select “Get help” Use the support messenger to describe your billing issue (duplicate charge, failed renewal, refund request, missing credits, invoice issue, etc.)
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
Some days I think the only solution is what Bombita did in the movie Relatos Salvajes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3IwmM3XLQ
you will do it again because you are an all-day sucker
Just refuse to pay any bill from any vendor that by their own public admission) is a "incorrect bill".
This isn't just about PR and technicalities, this is Business 101.
English is not my first language, so I might have misunderstood....
The rest of the support response is just pleasantries and padding, to dance around this fact ("Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable" blah blah).
There should have been a two layer approach:
1. Run regex to screen for target word
2. If positive, run the context through a cheap AI model
I think people put this out of proportion. Yes, you can reason this is ethically correct - I don't object to this. But people used Anthropic, Claude etc... in the first place. Why would you use something to then be disappointed about how it performs, when it comes to AI? Would not be the better and easier strategy to ... not use it in the first place, and make yourself dependable on AI? I don't fully understand this. I would not run into a similar situation because I simply don't use any AI. I actively want to support those folks who don't use AI either - that way we can point out all the ill effects of AI, such as in the case of Anthropic to prioritize on greed.
What a claude excuse
(Virtual card provider that generates cards as a free-to-the-user service. They make their money from a cut of the standard transaction fees. Cards are locked to a single merchant and it’s easy to configure limits.)
Allow users to file a lawsuit against the company using AI against their customers and judge the company only on what the AI generated without a chance to add anything more in their defense. Also any boilerplate legalese the AIs will quote in reaction to such laws is null and void.
Suddenly every AI support channel will have an "escalate to human support" button.
Anthropic will need to make sure that i am never charged beyond my subscription fees before I consider a sub.
The person who created the PR is user "sasha-id".
The person saying no to the refund is also user "sasha-id".
What?
Where was it exactly thats someone from Anthropic said no to a refund request? I feel I am missing the obvious somehow.
He didn't quote the Anthropic response, leading to the impression that he was Anthropic staff, confusing you, me and "CollectionAgency" in the issue thread, among others, I assume.
I can’t believe they paid 100m for some of these employees. They could have bought entire companies of real developers.
Ah yes, cause who bothers to test any releases to actual paying customers
A. Do shady shit to try to hurt competitors/stop distillation/stop pro plan users using other coding harnesses/etc.
B. Any shady shit that gets viral enough gets a PR apology response and removed.
C. Add new shady shit. GoTo => A.
And I am incredulous as to how this opinion is not more widespread.
The deeper into the new world order, the more you'll be charged for every breath, by design and by bugs-as-features all the same, refunds be against technofascist manifestos.
Krasis is one such tool that allows large models using blended GPU/RAM.
ik_llama for better performance than llama.
ComfyAI for local image generation.
Nanocrab seems better for orchestration. Still need a good system capability firewall.
Which now, 32GB goes for $300. Fucking insane. But prices will eventually come down as the enterprise and corpo scalpers realize AI is a losing deal for human replacement. Nvidia has already said as much.
https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...
On other hand I wonder what other filenames one could include in their repos to cause this sort of behaviour. Kinda a nudge towards people leaving these tools.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...