Anthropic may be a bunch of skids but it sounds like they did the right thing here. Pretty much all SaaS applications, especially in B2B, are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship.
The only example I can think of are the TV services: Netflix will erase your watched show list if you unsubscribe. But they are very purposefully doing it out of spite: they want to push you towards not unsubscribing at all (so they penalize it even at the cost of discouraging you from coming back ... because they know "subscription hopping" is a thing, and expect you'll come back anyway).
It's 100% a dick move when the TV services do it, but at least it (kind of) makes business sense for them to do it. For Claude it's just alienating their customers needlessly.
> are required by compliance to remove customer data within X amount of time at the end of the contractual relationship.
that's a very bullshit justification, we're not talking about the 'delete account' button - especially since claude has a free tier.
Google Workspace seems to halt access immediately[1] and purge data within 60d[2]. For comparison, Atlassian leaves you access for 15d, and purges data at 60d[3]. 365 gives you 90d[4] before purging.
This is a pretty regular thing across the industry.
[1] https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/billing/cancel-...
[2] https://support.google.com/a/thread/345697828/recovering-dat...
[3] https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/d...
[4] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...
I want to know if I should subscribe again to get this data or shouldn't bother.
You can talk about all these rules, but that was my data, when I was subscribed to their product, I'm not asking for access to generate more, just my past sessions.
How long would you expect them to keep your data for? Do you really expect them to pay storage costs for your data indefinitely just because you paid them $20 once upon a time?
And on the inverse side, would you really want your data to be compromised when they inevitably get breached just because you had a sub there once?
These are the reasons data retention policies exist.