Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did.

Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts.

I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out.

I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".

It completely blew me away and I felt suddenly so betrayed. I was paying $200/mo to fully utilize a service they offered and then without warning I apparently did something wrong and had no recourse. No one to ask, no one to talk to.

My advice is to be extremely wary of Anthropic. They paint themselves as the underdog/good guys, but they are just as faceless as the rest of them.

Oh, and have a backup workflow. Find / test / use other LLMs and providers. Don't become dependent on a single provider.

Banned and appeal declined without any real explanation to what happened, other than saying "violation of ToS" which can be basically anything, except there was really nothing to trigger that, other than using their most of the free credits they gave to test CC Web in less than a week. (No third party tools or VPN or anything really) There were many people had similar issues at the same time, reported on Reddit, so it wasn't an isolated case.

Companies and their brand teams work hard to create trust, then an automated false-positive can break that trust in a second.

As their ads say: "Keep thinking. There has never been a better time to have a problem."

I've been thinking since then, what was the problem. But I guess I will "Keep thinking".

Edit: my only other comment on HN is also complaining about this 11 months ago

I have a friend that had a similar experience with amazon, and using an european online platform specific for this he actually got amazon to reopen his business account.

There is a useful list of these european complaints platforms at the bottom of this page: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...

I think I kind of have an idea what the author was doing, but not really.

You are only allowed to program computers with the permission of mega corporations.

When Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini have banned you, you must leave the industry.

When you sign up, you must provide legal assurance that no LLM has ever banned you (much like applying for insurance). If true then you will be denied permission to program - banned by one, banned by all.

> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.

> Or I don't know. This is all just a guess from me.

And no response from support.

Out of all of the tech organizations, frontier labs are the one org you'd expect to be trying out cutting edge forms of support. Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit?

I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical. Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let loose.

I also think it's essential for the anthropic platform in the long-run. And not just in the obvious ways (customer loyalty etc). I don't know if anyone has brought this up at Anthropic, but it's such a huge risk for Anthropic's long-term strategic position. They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support, then why should we?"

It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are.

For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.

    API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"Output blocked by content filtering policy"},

According to Claude:

    I don't have visibility into exactly what triggered the content filter - it was likely a false positive. The code I'm writing (pinyin/Chinese/English mode detection for a language learning search feature) is completely benign.

I think there's a wide spread in how that's implemented. I would certainly not describe Grok as a tool that's prioritized safety at all.

Or better yet, we should setup something that allows people to share a part of their local GPU processing (like SETI@home) for a distributed LLM that cannot be censored. And somehow be compensated when it's used for inference

I didn't really think about this until now (I am just solving my problem), but I guess I could get OpenCode'd for this. Similar to the OP I don't find I am doing anything particularly weird, but if their use case wasn't looked upon favorably by Anthropic, mine probably won't be either.

After the OpenCode drama where some people got banned for using it I saw some people from Anthropic on Twitter asking folks to DM them if they got banned and they'd get unbanned. I know I wouldn't be doing that, so I guess if I get banned, I am back to Codex for a while.

I wonder if Anthropic realizes the chilling effect this kind of event has on developers. It's not just the ones who get locked out -- it's a cost for everybody, because we can't depend on the tool when it's doing precisely what it's best at.

Personally, I am already avoiding Gemini because a) I don't really understand their policy for training on your data; and b) if Google gets mad at me I lose my email. (Which the author also notes.)

I was also banned for that. Also didn't get the "FU" in email. Thankfully at least I didn't pay for this, but I'd file chargeback instantly if I could.

If anyone from Claude is reading it, you're c**s.

If you're wondering, the "risk department" means people in an organization who are responsible for finding and firing customers who are either engaged in illegal behavior, scamming the business, or both. They're like mall rent-a-cops, in that they don't have any real power beyond kicking you out, and they don't have any investigatory powers either. But this lack of power also means the only effective enforcement strategy is summary judgment, at scale with no legal recourse. And the rules have to be secret, with inconsistent enforcement, to make honest customers second-guess themselves into doing something risky. "You know what you did."

Of course, the flipside of this is that we have no idea what the fuck Hugo Daniel was actually doing. Anthropic knows more than we do, in fact: they at least have the Claude.md files he was generating and the prompts used to generate them. It's entirely possible that these prompts were about how to write malware or something else equally illegal. Or, alternatively, Anthropic's risk department is just a handful of log analysis tools running on autopilot that gave no consideration to what was in this guy's prompts and just banned him for the behavior he thinks he was banned for.

Because the risk department is an unaccountable secret police, the only recourse for their actions is to make hay in the media. But that's not scalable. There isn't enough space in the newspaper for everyone who gets banned to complain about it, no matter how egregious their case is. So we get all these vague blog posts about getting banned for seemingly innocuous behavior that could actually be fraud.

Was the issue that he was reselling these Claude.md files, or that he was selling project setup or creation services to his clients?

Or maybe all scaffolding activity (back and forth) looked like automated usage?

But to be honest I've been cursing a lot to Claude Code, im migrating a website from WordPress to NextJS. And regardless of my instructions I copy paste every prompt I send it keeps not listening and assuming css classes & simpliying HTML structure. But when I curse it actually listens, I think cursing is actually a useful tool in interacting with LLM's.

I can run very long, stable sessions via Claude Code, but the desktop app regularly throws errors or simply stops the conversation. A few weeks ago, Anthropic introduced conversation compaction in the Claude web app. That change was very welcome, but it no longer seems to work reliably. Conversations now often stop progressing. Sometimes I get a red error message, sometimes nothing at all. The prompt just cannot be submitted anymore.

I am an early Claude user and subscribed to the Max plan when it launched. I like their models and overall direction, but reliability has clearly degraded in recent weeks.

Another observation: ChatGPT Pro tends to give much more senior and balanced responses when evaluating non-technical situations. Claude, in comparison, sometimes produces suggestions that feel irrational or emotionally driven. At this point, I mostly use Claude for coding tasks, but not for project or decision-related work, where the responses often lack sufficient depth.

Lastly, I really like Claude’s output formatting. The Markdown is consistently clean and well structured, and better than any competitor I have used. I strongly dislike ChatGPT’s formatting and often feed its responses into Claude Haiku just to reformat them into proper Markdown.

Curious whether others are seeing the same behavior.

I once tried Claude made a new account and asked it to create a sample program it refused. I asked it to create a simple game and it refused. I asked it to create anything and it refused.

For playing around just go local and write your own multi agent wrapper. Much more fun and it opens many more possibilities with uncensored llms. Things will take longer but you'll end up at the same place.. with a mostly working piece of code you never want to look at.

Why is this inevitable? Because Hal only ever sees Claude's failures and none of the successes. So of course Hal gets frustrated and angry that Claude continually gets everything wrong no matter how Hal prompts him.

(Of course it's not really getting frustrated and annoyed, but a person would, so Hal plays that role)

Is it me or is this word salad?

This... sounds highly concerning

By the way, since as of late, google search redirects me to a "are you a bot?" question constantly. The primary reason is because I no longer use google search directly via the browser, but instead via the commandline (and for some weird reason chrome does not keep my settings, as I start it exclusively via the --no-sandbox option). We really need alternatives to Google - this is getting out of hand how much top-down control these corporations now have over our digital lives.

PS: screenshot of my usage (and that was during the holidays https://x.com/eibrahim/status/2006355823002538371?s=46

PPS: I LOVE CLAUDE but I never had to deal with their support so don’t have feedback there

Blocking xAI is also bad karma.

I have a complete org hierarchy for Claudes. Director, EM and Worker Claude Code instances working on a very long horizon task.

Code is open source: https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator

Who knew that using Claude to introspect on itself was against the ToS?

Also the API timeouts that people complain about - i see them on my Linux box a fair bit, especially when it has a lot of background tasks open, but it seems pretty rock solid on my Windows machine.

Lol, what is the point in this software if you can't use it for development?

Looks like Claude.ai had the right idea when they banned you.

I ran out of tokens for not just the 5 hour sessions, but all models for the week. Had to wait a day -- so my methadone equivalent was to strap an endpoint-rewriting proxy to Claude Code and backend it with a local Qwen3 30B Coder. It was.. somewhat adequate. Just as fast, but not as capable as Opus 4.5 - I think it could handle carefully specced small greenfield projects, but it was getting tangled in my Claudefield mess.

All that to say -- be prepared, have a local fallback! The lords are coming for your ploughshares.

I expect more reports like this. LLM providers are already selling tokens at a loss. If everyone starts to use tmux or orchestrate multiple agents then their loss on each plan is going to get much larger.

Is this going to get me banned? If so i'll switch to a different non-anthropic model.

> We may modify, suspend, or discontinue the Services or your access to the Services.

Granted, it’s not going to be Claude scale but it’d be nice to do some of it locally.

OpenHands, Toad, and OpenCode are fully OSS and LLM-agnostic

If the OP really wants to waste tokens like this, they should use a metered API so they are the one paying for the ineffectiveness, not Anthropic.

(Posted by someone who has Claude Max and yet also uses $1500+ a month of metered rate Claude in Kilo Code)

Saying this is "late Capitalism" is an irresponsible distraction. Capitalism runs fine when appropriately regulated with strong regulations on corporations, especially monopolies, high taxes on the wealthy, and pervasive unionization. We collectively decided to let Capitalism go wild without boundaries and the results are caused by us and our responsibility. Just like driving fast with a badly maintained vehicle may lead to a crash, Capitalism is a system that requires some regulation to run properly.

If you have an issue with LLMs and how they are managed then you should take responsibility for your own use of tools and not blame the economic system.

But I've seen orgs bite the bullet in the last 18 months and what they deployed is miles behind what Claude Code can do today. When the "Moore's Law" curve for LLM capability improvements flattens out, it will be a better time to lock into a locally hosted solution.

That's great news ! They don't have nearly enough staff to deal with support issues, so they default to reimbursement. Which means if you do this every month, you get Claude for free :)

Nothing in their EULA or ToS says anything about this.

And their appeal form simply doesn't work. Out of my four requests to lift the ban, they've replied once and didn't say anything about the nature about that. They just declined.

Fuck Claude. Seriously. Fuck Claude. Maybe they've got too much money, so they don't care about their paying customers.

Absolutely disgusting behavior pirating all those books. The founder spreading fear to hype up his business. The likely relentless shilling campaigns all over social media. Very likely lying about quantizing selectively.

What are you gonna do with the results that are usually slop?

1. Claude Code stopped working. 2. I received an email about the ban. 3. Fine, time to contact support. I've wrote to them. 4. I got an automated message saying they were reviewing my case. 5. I received a refund (I had a Pro plan) in the meantime. 6. After a few days I got this funny email:

Hi there,

We're reaching out to people who recently canceled their Claude Code subscription in order to understand why you decided to cancel.

We'd like to invite you to participate in an AI-moderated interview about your experience with Claude Code—including what improvements you'd like to see us make.

This approach uses an AI interviewer to ask you questions and respond to your answers, creating a conversational experience you can complete at your convenience.

Here's what you need to know:

The interview takes 15-20 minutes to complete This interview will be available until Monday October 13 at 9pm PT For completing the interview, you'll receive a $40 USD (or local equivalent) Amazon gift card within 3-5 business days Please complete only one interview per person As much as possible, help us know you're not a bot by showing your beautiful human face!

Your survey may terminate early if you record illegible video content (ex: overly loud environments, aren't well lighted, etc) Participate Now

This interview is administered by a third party, Listen Labs. By participating in the interview, you agree to Listen Labs' Privacy Policy. Anthropic may use your responses to improve our services and follow up.

Your honest feedback—whether your experience was positive, challenging, or mixed—is invaluable in helping us understand how to make Claude Code work better for developers like you.

Thank you for your time and insights!

–The Anthropic Team

7. Wait, you banned me and now you’re sending me this email? Seriously? Okay, I decided to participate in the survey. Unfortunately, when I selected the option that it was due to a bug or some issue, they ended the survey. No gift card.

8. A few days later, I received an email saying they couldn’t reinstate my account because I had violated their usage policy. How? No idea.

9. After a few more days, I got an email saying they had reinstated my account. They also mentioned they believed it was a bug.

It was crazy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This blog post could have been a tweet.

I'm so so so tired of reading this style of writing.

I'm not sure I understand the jab here at capitalism. If you don't want to pay that, then don't.

Isn't that the point of capitalism?

… right ?

But Claude Code (the app) will work with a self-hosted open source model and a compatible gateway. I'd just move to doing that.