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I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you expect. Out of all of the tech organiz

I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you expect. 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?"

lukan 9mo ago
I would say it is a strong sign, they do not trust their agent yet, to allow them significant buisness decisions, that a support agent would have to do. Reopening accounts, closing them, refunds, .. people would immediately start to try to exploit them. And will likely succeed.
- atonse 9mo ago
  My guess is that it's more "we are right now using every talented individual right now to make sure our datacenters don't burn down from all the demand. we'll get to support soon once we can come up for air" But at the same time, they have been hiring folks to help with Non Profits, etc.
WarmWash 9mo ago
Claude is an amazing coding model, its other abilities are middling. Anthropic's strategy seems to be to just focus on coding, and they do it well.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > Anthropic's strategy seems to be to just focus on coding, and they do it well. Based on their homepage, that doesn't seem to be true at all. Claude Code yes, focuses just on programming, but for "Claude" it seems they're marketing as a general "problem solving" tool, not just for coding. https://claude.com/product/overview https://claude.com/product/overview
  - Ethee 9mo ago
    Isn't this the case for almost every product ever? Company makes product -> markets as widely as possible -> only niche group become power users/find market fit. I don't see a problem with this. Marketing doesn't always have to tell the full story, sometimes the reality of your products capabilities and what the people giving you money want aren't always aligned.
  - WarmWash 9mo ago
    Anthropic isn't bothering with image models, audio models, video models, world models. They don't have science/math models, they don't bother with mathematics competitions, and they don't have open model models either. Anthropic has claude code, it's a hit product, SWE's love claude models. Watching Anthropic rather than listening to them makes their goals clear.
- arcanemachiner 9mo ago
  Interesting. Would anyone care to chime in with their opinion of the best all-rounder model?
  - WarmWash 9mo ago
    You'll get 30 different opinions and all those will disagree with each other. Use the top models and see what works for you.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
  Critically, this has to be their play, because there are several other big players in the "commodity LLM" space. They need to find a niche or there is no reason to stick with them. OpenAI has been chaotically trying to pivot to more diversified products and revenue sources, and hasn't focused a ton on code/DevEx. This is a huge gap for Anthropic to exploit. But there are still competitors. So they have to provide a better experience, better product. They need to make people want to use them over others. Famously people hate Google because of their lack of support and impersonality. And OpenAI also seems to be very impersonal; there's no way to track bugs you report in ChatGPT, no tickets, you have no idea if the pain you're feeling is being worked on. Anthropic can easily make themselves stand out from Gemini and ChatGPT by just being more human.
eightysixfour 9mo ago
> Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit? I come from a world where customer support is a significant expense for operations and everyone was SO excited to implement AI for this. It doesn't work particularly well and shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is. Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-middle management and executives than it is the customer service problems.
- swiftcoder 9mo ago
  > shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is special/unique!)
  - 0xferruccio 9mo ago
    to be fair at least half of the software engineers i know are facing some level of existential crisis when seeing how well claude code works, and what it means for their job in the long term and these are people are not junior developers working on trivial apps
    - swiftcoder 9mo ago
      Yeah, I've watched a few peers go down this spiral as well. I'm not sure why, because my experience is that Claude Code and friends are building a lifetime of job security for staff-level folks, unscrewing every org that decided to over-delegate to the machine
      - Macha 9mo ago
        Cleanup is less enjoyable than product building. If every future job is cleaning up a massive pile of AI slop, then that is a less fulfilling world than currently.
munk-a 9mo ago
> They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support, then why should we?" Don't worry - I'm sure they won't and those stakeholders will feel confident in their enlightened decision to send their most frustrated customers through a chatbot that repeatedly asks them for detailed and irrelevant information and won't let them proceed to any other support levels until it is provided. I, for one, welcome our new helpful overlords that have very reasonably asked me for my highschool transcript and a ten page paper on why I think the bug happened before letting me talk to a real person. That's efficiency.
- throwawaysleep 9mo ago
  > to send their most frustrated customers through a chatbot But do those frustrated customers matter?
  - munk-a 9mo ago
    I just checked - frustrated customers isn't a metric we track for performance incentives so no, they do not.
    - throwawaysleep 9mo ago
      Even if you do track them, if 0.1% of customers are unhappy and contacting support, that's not worth any kind of thought when AI is such an open space at the moment.
magicmicah85 9mo ago
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9015913-how-to-get-support https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9015913-how-to-get-su... Their support includes talking to Fin, their AI support with escalations to humans as needed. I dont use Claude and have never used the support bot, but their docs say they have support.
- wielebny 9mo ago
  Thank you for pointing that out. I was banned two weeks ago without explanation and - in my opinion - without probable cause. Appeal was left without response. I refuse to join Discord. I've checked bot support before but it was useless. Article you've linked mentions DSA chat for EU users. Invoking DSA in chat immediately escalated my issue to a human. Hopefully at least I'll get to know why Anthropic banned me.
throwawaysleep 9mo ago
Eh, I can see support simply not being worth any real effort, i.e. having nobody working on it full time. I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be worth offering support. Their emails were sent straight to the bin until they quit. The support queue was entirely for their psychological support/to buy a few months of extra revenue. It didn't matter what their problems were. Supporting smaller people simply wasn't worth the effort statistically. > 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. Are there enough people who need support that it matters?
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be worth offering support. In companies where your average ARR is 500k+ and large customers are in the millions, it may not be a bad strategy. 'Good' support agents may be cheaper than programmers, but not by that much. The issues small clients have can quite often be as complicated as and eat up as much time as your larger clients depending on what the industry is.
furyofantares 9mo ago
> I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. The article discusses using Anthropic support. Without much satisfaction, but it seems like you "recently found out" something false.
- kmoser 9mo ago
  If you want to split hairs, it seem that Anthropic has support as a noun but not as a verb.
  - furyofantares 9mo ago
    I mean the comment says they literally don't have support and also complains they don't have a support bot, when they have both. https://support.claude.com/en/collections/4078531-claude https://support.claude.com/en/collections/4078531-claude > As a paid user of Claude or the Console, you have full access to: > All help documentation > Fin, our AI support bot > Further assistance from our Product Support team > Note: While we don't offer phone or live chat support, our Product Support team will gladly assist you through our support messenger.
    - swordsith 9mo ago
      I would think on his suspension and refund he would not have access to that support channel anymore?
      - furyofantares 9mo ago
        I would think so too. If their support is bad and you can get cut off from it with no recourse, is that a good reason to supply our fellow HN readers with misinformation based on rumor? We should just say false things to each other and it's OK as long as they're bad things about the right people? That is certainly how a lot of the internet works but I have higher hopes for us here. We can just say "their support is bad and you can get cut off from it with no recourse" without also supporting misinformation.
csours 9mo ago
Human attention will be the luxury product of the next decade.
Lerc 9mo ago
There is a discord, but I have not found it to be the friendliest of places. At one point I observed a conversation which, to me, seemed to be a user attempting to communicate in a good faith manner who was given instructions that they clearly did not understand, and then were subsequently banned for not following the rules. It seems now they have a policy of Warning on First Offense → Ban on Second Offense The following behaviors will result in a warning. Continued violations will result in a permanent ban: Disrespectful or dismissive comments toward other members Personal attacks or heated arguments that cross the line Minor rule violations (off-topic posting, light self-promotion) Behavior that derails productive conversation Unnecessary @-mentions of moderators or Anthropic staff I'm not sure how many groups moderate in a manner that a second offence off-topic comment is worthy of a ban. It seems a little harsh. I'm not a fan of obviously subjective banable offences. I'm a little surprised that Anthropic hasn't fostered a more welcoming community. Everyone is learning this stuff new, together or not. There is plenty of opportunity for people to help each other.
root_axis 9mo ago
LLMs aren't really suitable for much of anything that can't already be done as self-service on a website. These days, a human only gets involved when the business process wants to put some friction between the user and some action. An LLM can't really be trusted for this kind of stuff due to prompt injection and hallucinations.
heavyset_go 9mo ago
Offering any support is setting expectations of receiving support. If you don't offer support, reality meets expectations, which sucks, but not enough for the money machine to care.
mft_ 9mo ago
There was that experiment run where an office gave Claude control of its vending machine ordering with… interesting results. My assumption is that Claude isn’t used directly for customer service because: 1) it would be too suggestible in some cases 2) even in more usual circumstances it would be too reasonable (“yes, you’re right, that is bad performance, I’ll refund your yearly subscription”, etc.) and not act as the customer-unfriendly wall that customer service sometimes needs to be.

lukan 9mo ago

I would say it is a strong sign, they do not trust their agent yet, to allow them significant buisness decisions, that a support agent would have to do. Reopening accounts, closing them, refunds, .. people would immediately start to try to exploit them. And will likely succeed.

atonse 9mo ago
My guess is that it's more "we are right now using every talented individual right now to make sure our datacenters don't burn down from all the demand. we'll get to support soon once we can come up for air" But at the same time, they have been hiring folks to help with Non Profits, etc.

WarmWash 9mo ago

Claude is an amazing coding model, its other abilities are middling. Anthropic's strategy seems to be to just focus on coding, and they do it well.

embedding-shape 9mo ago
> Anthropic's strategy seems to be to just focus on coding, and they do it well. Based on their homepage, that doesn't seem to be true at all. Claude Code yes, focuses just on programming, but for "Claude" it seems they're marketing as a general "problem solving" tool, not just for coding. https://claude.com/product/overview https://claude.com/product/overview
- Ethee 9mo ago
  Isn't this the case for almost every product ever? Company makes product -> markets as widely as possible -> only niche group become power users/find market fit. I don't see a problem with this. Marketing doesn't always have to tell the full story, sometimes the reality of your products capabilities and what the people giving you money want aren't always aligned.
- WarmWash 9mo ago
  Anthropic isn't bothering with image models, audio models, video models, world models. They don't have science/math models, they don't bother with mathematics competitions, and they don't have open model models either. Anthropic has claude code, it's a hit product, SWE's love claude models. Watching Anthropic rather than listening to them makes their goals clear.
arcanemachiner 9mo ago
Interesting. Would anyone care to chime in with their opinion of the best all-rounder model?
- WarmWash 9mo ago
  You'll get 30 different opinions and all those will disagree with each other. Use the top models and see what works for you.
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
Critically, this has to be their play, because there are several other big players in the "commodity LLM" space. They need to find a niche or there is no reason to stick with them. OpenAI has been chaotically trying to pivot to more diversified products and revenue sources, and hasn't focused a ton on code/DevEx. This is a huge gap for Anthropic to exploit. But there are still competitors. So they have to provide a better experience, better product. They need to make people want to use them over others. Famously people hate Google because of their lack of support and impersonality. And OpenAI also seems to be very impersonal; there's no way to track bugs you report in ChatGPT, no tickets, you have no idea if the pain you're feeling is being worked on. Anthropic can easily make themselves stand out from Gemini and ChatGPT by just being more human.

eightysixfour 9mo ago

> Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit? I come from a world where customer support is a significant expense for operations and everyone was SO excited to implement AI for this. It doesn't work particularly well and shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is. Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-middle management and executives than it is the customer service problems.

swiftcoder 9mo ago
> shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is special/unique!)
- 0xferruccio 9mo ago
  to be fair at least half of the software engineers i know are facing some level of existential crisis when seeing how well claude code works, and what it means for their job in the long term and these are people are not junior developers working on trivial apps
  - swiftcoder 9mo ago
    Yeah, I've watched a few peers go down this spiral as well. I'm not sure why, because my experience is that Claude Code and friends are building a lifetime of job security for staff-level folks, unscrewing every org that decided to over-delegate to the machine
    - Macha 9mo ago
      Cleanup is less enjoyable than product building. If every future job is cleaning up a massive pile of AI slop, then that is a less fulfilling world than currently.

munk-a 9mo ago

> They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support, then why should we?" Don't worry - I'm sure they won't and those stakeholders will feel confident in their enlightened decision to send their most frustrated customers through a chatbot that repeatedly asks them for detailed and irrelevant information and won't let them proceed to any other support levels until it is provided. I, for one, welcome our new helpful overlords that have very reasonably asked me for my highschool transcript and a ten page paper on why I think the bug happened before letting me talk to a real person. That's efficiency.

throwawaysleep 9mo ago
> to send their most frustrated customers through a chatbot But do those frustrated customers matter?
- munk-a 9mo ago
  I just checked - frustrated customers isn't a metric we track for performance incentives so no, they do not.
  - throwawaysleep 9mo ago
    Even if you do track them, if 0.1% of customers are unhappy and contacting support, that's not worth any kind of thought when AI is such an open space at the moment.

magicmicah85 9mo ago

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9015913-how-to-get-support https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9015913-how-to-get-su... Their support includes talking to Fin, their AI support with escalations to humans as needed. I dont use Claude and have never used the support bot, but their docs say they have support.

wielebny 9mo ago
Thank you for pointing that out. I was banned two weeks ago without explanation and - in my opinion - without probable cause. Appeal was left without response. I refuse to join Discord. I've checked bot support before but it was useless. Article you've linked mentions DSA chat for EU users. Invoking DSA in chat immediately escalated my issue to a human. Hopefully at least I'll get to know why Anthropic banned me.

throwawaysleep 9mo ago

Eh, I can see support simply not being worth any real effort, i.e. having nobody working on it full time. I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be worth offering support. Their emails were sent straight to the bin until they quit. The support queue was entirely for their psychological support/to buy a few months of extra revenue. It didn't matter what their problems were. Supporting smaller people simply wasn't worth the effort statistically. > 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. Are there enough people who need support that it matters?

pixl97 9mo ago
>I worked for a unicorn tech company where they determined that anyone with under 50,000 ARR was too unsophisticated to be worth offering support. In companies where your average ARR is 500k+ and large customers are in the millions, it may not be a bad strategy. 'Good' support agents may be cheaper than programmers, but not by that much. The issues small clients have can quite often be as complicated as and eat up as much time as your larger clients depending on what the industry is.

furyofantares 9mo ago

> I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. The article discusses using Anthropic support. Without much satisfaction, but it seems like you "recently found out" something false.

kmoser 9mo ago
If you want to split hairs, it seem that Anthropic has support as a noun but not as a verb.
- furyofantares 9mo ago
  I mean the comment says they literally don't have support and also complains they don't have a support bot, when they have both. https://support.claude.com/en/collections/4078531-claude https://support.claude.com/en/collections/4078531-claude > As a paid user of Claude or the Console, you have full access to: > All help documentation > Fin, our AI support bot > Further assistance from our Product Support team > Note: While we don't offer phone or live chat support, our Product Support team will gladly assist you through our support messenger.
  - swordsith 9mo ago
    I would think on his suspension and refund he would not have access to that support channel anymore?
    - furyofantares 9mo ago
      I would think so too. If their support is bad and you can get cut off from it with no recourse, is that a good reason to supply our fellow HN readers with misinformation based on rumor? We should just say false things to each other and it's OK as long as they're bad things about the right people? That is certainly how a lot of the internet works but I have higher hopes for us here. We can just say "their support is bad and you can get cut off from it with no recourse" without also supporting misinformation.

csours 9mo ago

Human attention will be the luxury product of the next decade.

Lerc 9mo ago

There is a discord, but I have not found it to be the friendliest of places. At one point I observed a conversation which, to me, seemed to be a user attempting to communicate in a good faith manner who was given instructions that they clearly did not understand, and then were subsequently banned for not following the rules. It seems now they have a policy of Warning on First Offense → Ban on Second Offense The following behaviors will result in a warning. Continued violations will result in a permanent ban: Disrespectful or dismissive comments toward other members Personal attacks or heated arguments that cross the line Minor rule violations (off-topic posting, light self-promotion) Behavior that derails productive conversation Unnecessary @-mentions of moderators or Anthropic staff I'm not sure how many groups moderate in a manner that a second offence off-topic comment is worthy of a ban. It seems a little harsh. I'm not a fan of obviously subjective banable offences. I'm a little surprised that Anthropic hasn't fostered a more welcoming community. Everyone is learning this stuff new, together or not. There is plenty of opportunity for people to help each other.

root_axis 9mo ago

LLMs aren't really suitable for much of anything that can't already be done as self-service on a website. These days, a human only gets involved when the business process wants to put some friction between the user and some action. An LLM can't really be trusted for this kind of stuff due to prompt injection and hallucinations.

heavyset_go 9mo ago

Offering any support is setting expectations of receiving support. If you don't offer support, reality meets expectations, which sucks, but not enough for the money machine to care.

mft_ 9mo ago

There was that experiment run where an office gave Claude control of its vending machine ordering with… interesting results. My assumption is that Claude isn’t used directly for customer service because: 1) it would be too suggestible in some cases 2) even in more usual circumstances it would be too reasonable (“yes, you’re right, that is bad performance, I’ll refund your yearly subscription”, etc.) and not act as the customer-unfriendly wall that customer service sometimes needs to be.