6 ms·

Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (cla

by andai 7mo ago

Well, off the top of my head: - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics) - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto) (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) - Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD)) - Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex. - Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc. It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs". I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.

risyachka 7mo ago
>> apparently a bug? it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature
- OtomotO 7mo ago
  A bug for one side can be a feature for another
esperent 7mo ago
> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet. I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else. But claude -p is fine. ... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?
- andai 7mo ago
  The other day I read that letting another agent invoke claude -p was considered a violation (i.e. letting OpenClaw delegate to Claude Code). Not sure how that's enforced though. I was in OpenClaw discord a while ago and enforcement seemed a bit random. I'll try to find the source, I might have gotten the details mixed up.
  - jeremyjh 7mo ago
    It’s not a “violation” but they said it would be charged as extra usage.
    - zackify 7mo ago
      This is a funny cat and mouse game. They offer a built in loop command. Just tmux and use that. Soon if they drop -p people will just vibe code in 5 minutes a way to type inside it remotely similar to their own built in remote access tool. Seems like a losing game from anthropics side
joshstrange 7mo ago
> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) 100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.
- stingraycharles 7mo ago
  In this case, they handled things pretty well. You can still use openclaw etc with your regular Anthropic subscription, it will just count towards your extra credits / usage which you can buy for a 30% discount compared to API pricing. And they gave everyone one month’s value in credits. I don’t think they could have done that much better I’d say.
  - cedws 7mo ago
    That does not address joshstrange's concerns. There is very poor clarity about what is and isn't allowed with the Claude SDK/claude -p. Are we allowed to use it to automate stuff? What kind of tasks is it permitted to be used for? What if you call your script 'OrangeClaw' and release that on GitHub? What if your script gets super popular, does it suddenly become against TOS?
    - joshstrange 7mo ago
      This is exactly my point. At what point does it become a ToS violation? Right now it's a huge grey area and the idea of getting my account banned because I crossed an invisible line with zero recourse other than to switch providers is... frustrating.
      - deaux 7mo ago
        It's pretty easy to read between the lines tbh. Personal, non-automated use is fine. Using it as a means to automate depleting your 5-hour limit 24/7 ("leftover usage") is not fine. They don't want to put in in the ToS because it's almost impossible because writing what I just said will still have people going "well what's automated, where's the exact line!" when it's all pretty clear what the intended use case here is. The Anthropic peeps have said about as much. I get that the traditional dev is allergic to the concept of reading between the lines and demands everything to be spelled out explicitly, but maybe you should just see it as something to learn because it's an incredibly useful life skill.
politelemon 7mo ago
Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.
- cedws 7mo ago
  There’s the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code to use the models efficiently, which the subscription pricing is based on. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.
  - Zetaphor 7mo ago
    Alternatively products like openclaw have an outsized impact on Anthropic's infrastructure for essentially no benefit to them. Especially when you're taking advantage of the $200 plan. OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of cash to try and capture a little more market share. They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.
    - plusplusungood 7mo ago
      > Taking advantage of the $200 plan. No, I'm paying $200 a month for a premium product that I expect premium service for. It's the single most expensive IT expense I have. Taking advantage my foot.
      - charcircuit 7mo ago
        It's not a premium product. It's just expensive.
      - infecto 7mo ago
        You are simply a bit too entitled. It's not a premium product and honestly not that expensive in my opinion either (though that is going to depend on your location). You are more than able to pay for API rates.
rlpb 7mo ago
> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs". I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?
- sshine 7mo ago
  > Perhaps Anthropic is struggling to meet demand? Yes, definitely, they’re gracefully failing to meet demand. They could also deny new customers, but it would probably be bad for business.
  - leesalminen 7mo ago
    I once decided to deny new customers in order to be able to service current demand at the quality we wanted. It backfired and made people want our product even more. Our phones were blowing up. That approach can have unintended consequences!
    - sunnybeetroot 7mo ago
      You unintentionally used a common sales tactic; by decreasing supply you increase demand.
    - ayewo 7mo ago
      Another knob you could have turned is: raise prices. Did you try this?
      - sshine 7mo ago
        Anthropic is already doing this. Signup prices seem higher now than three months ago. This is actually the least frustrating method because people who can't afford to pay are not as angry as people who paid and aren't getting served (like when sign-in emails don't arrive for hours or days), or people who have paid for a long time to suddenly see quality decrease. But it might not be best for business: Having more users than you can handle might suck, but if you're popular enough, people are still gonna put up with it.
fluidcruft 7mo ago
claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice). Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off. I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max. I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit. Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).
- visarga 7mo ago
  I might consider switching to codex from claude pro 20x but I need the post tool use, pre file write and post user message hooks. Waiting on codex to deliver. - pre file write -> block editing code files without a task and plan of work - post tool use -> show next open checkbox in the task to the agent, like an instruction pointer - post user message -> log all user messages for periodic review of intent alignment These 3 hooks + plain md files make my claude harness.
  - glasner 7mo ago
deaux 7mo ago
> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use", then no you don't get nuked.
- ls612 7mo ago
  It’s the same problem people have with Google. If they ban you for some AI hallucinated reason you have no recourse other than going viral on Hacker News.
  - deaux 7mo ago
    I haven't seen a single case of that happening with Anthropic yet. Every time someone has gotten banned it's because they either used third party harnesses which went to great lengths to impersonate claude code (obvious evasion), or because they set things up so it maxxed out their usage 24/7. I'll change my mind when I see otherwise. And this isn't being positive about Anthropic support or their treatment of users, as I too have seen lots of people here getting billed by them for stuff they never paid for, blatant fraud. That's even worse than Google. I'm only talking about getting banned for usage.
    - oooyay 7mo ago
      I plugged this question into Claude and told it to limit me to 10: 1. Cancer patient banned mid-payment — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675740 2. Hobbyist coder, VPN trigger, forms into void for 10+ months — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286867 3. "Reinstated" but still locked out — two systems out of sync — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007408 4. Banned for testing vision API — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39988137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39988137 5. Banned on first ever prompt ("What do you know about Hacker News?") — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698788 6. Mass banning wave, some banned before first use — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672765 7. Entire company banned without warning, thousands of users stranded — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210199 8. Forced new account (no email change support) → immediately banned — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339741 9. Banned for scaffolding a Claude.md file, support email never arrives — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384 10. $81 billing overcharge, human promised, month of silence — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679
rendaw 7mo ago
They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h. Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null). (By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)
Bolwin 7mo ago
Claude -p is allowed. They're not going to give you a feature then ban you for using it. What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is charged at api rates
- wild_egg 7mo ago
  It only switches to charging API rates if some part of your prompt triggers their magic string detector. Lot of examples of that floating around where swapping "is" for "are" or whatever will magically allow the request against your subscription plan again.
- TheDong 7mo ago
  "claude -p" does not charge api rates by itself, I just ran "claude -p 'write hello world to foo.txt'", and it didn't. What they changed is that if you have OpenClaw run 'claude -p' for you, that gets your account banned or charged API rates, and if they think your usage of 'claude -p' is maybe OpenClaw, even if it's not, you get charged API rates or banned. It seems so silly to me. They built a feature with one billing rate, and the feature is a bash command. If you have a bad program run the bash command, you get billed at a different rate, if you have a good script you wrote yourself run it, you're fine, but they have literally no legitimate way to tell the difference since either way it's just a command being run. The justification going around is that OpenClaw usage is so heavy that it impacts the service for other people, but like OpenClaw was just using the "claude code max" plan, so if they can't handle the usage the plan promises, they should be changing the plan. If they had instead said "Your claude code max plan, which has XX quota, will get charged API rates if you consistently use 50% of your quota. The quota is actually a lie, it's just the amount you can burst up to once or twice a week, but definitely not every day" and just banned everyone that used claude code a lot, I wouldn't be complaining as much, that'd be much more consistent.
infecto 7mo ago
Most of those are issues are coming from a very small minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most likely not users like yourself. 1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage. 2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change. Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!
stefan_ 7mo ago
I think we are about a month away from a class action lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non public ways.
timtimmy 7mo ago
Perhaps Anthropic should put a freeze on new signups until they can increase capacity. This is the best kind of problem for a business, I'm cheering for them.
- greenavocado 7mo ago
  If there is one thing that is crystal clear, its that LLM providers will always take your money, no matter how bad the service is.
- sscaryterry 7mo ago
  This requires ethics.
retinaros 7mo ago
i dont know why ppl are surprised. you just need to see what they say on china, open source and fake safety blogs to understand they re not a company that devs should give their code for free to
aftbit 7mo ago
Huh I've noticed that! Opus hallucinates answers and provides contradictory reasoning to me much more regularly during the past couple of weeks than it did in February. For example, after a question about a script that used taskset and CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to handle NUMA domains on a parallel GLUE evaluation run: >Round 2 tasks reuse GPU slots that Round 1 may still be occupying. Cola, SST-2, and QQP are small datasets and will likely finish before MNLI, but QNLI is sizable. If QNLI (GPU 3, slot 3) is still running when Round 2 launches, that's fine — they're on different slots. But more importantly, Round 2 uses slots 5/6/7 (GPUs 7/0/1), while Round 1 uses slots 0/1/2/3/4 (GPUs 4/5/2/3/6). So there's no GPU collision — you're good here actually. Disregard, this is clean.
siva7 7mo ago
Anthropic has become shady as hell in less than a few weeks. The DoD Story and the overall popularity among developers got them a huge leap over OAI but i certainly won't renew my subscription with them. The Claude SDK feels like a constant fight against its own limitations compared to Codex and other Harnesses.
- rachel_rig 7mo ago
  [dead]
smrtinsert 7mo ago
I will say I have noticed none of these things in my enterprise account. Is this is a known targeting of non-enterprise clients only?
mrgill 7mo ago
For what it's worth. I invoked claude -p from a script, and my account was nuked immediately. DM'd Thariq from Anthropic who admitted it was a weird classifier and would look into it, but then he never followed up. Been 13 days since I've been banned now. Very sad considering I got my whole company on Claude Code for them to just ban be like this, with no customer support response.

by andai 7mo ago

risyachka 7mo ago

>> apparently a bug? it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature

OtomotO 7mo ago
A bug for one side can be a feature for another

esperent 7mo ago

> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet. I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else. But claude -p is fine. ... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?

andai 7mo ago
The other day I read that letting another agent invoke claude -p was considered a violation (i.e. letting OpenClaw delegate to Claude Code). Not sure how that's enforced though. I was in OpenClaw discord a while ago and enforcement seemed a bit random. I'll try to find the source, I might have gotten the details mixed up.
- jeremyjh 7mo ago
  It’s not a “violation” but they said it would be charged as extra usage.
  - zackify 7mo ago
    This is a funny cat and mouse game. They offer a built in loop command. Just tmux and use that. Soon if they drop -p people will just vibe code in 5 minutes a way to type inside it remotely similar to their own built in remote access tool. Seems like a losing game from anthropics side

joshstrange 7mo ago

> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) 100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.

stingraycharles 7mo ago
In this case, they handled things pretty well. You can still use openclaw etc with your regular Anthropic subscription, it will just count towards your extra credits / usage which you can buy for a 30% discount compared to API pricing. And they gave everyone one month’s value in credits. I don’t think they could have done that much better I’d say.
- cedws 7mo ago
  That does not address joshstrange's concerns. There is very poor clarity about what is and isn't allowed with the Claude SDK/claude -p. Are we allowed to use it to automate stuff? What kind of tasks is it permitted to be used for? What if you call your script 'OrangeClaw' and release that on GitHub? What if your script gets super popular, does it suddenly become against TOS?
  - joshstrange 7mo ago
    This is exactly my point. At what point does it become a ToS violation? Right now it's a huge grey area and the idea of getting my account banned because I crossed an invisible line with zero recourse other than to switch providers is... frustrating.
    - deaux 7mo ago
      It's pretty easy to read between the lines tbh. Personal, non-automated use is fine. Using it as a means to automate depleting your 5-hour limit 24/7 ("leftover usage") is not fine. They don't want to put in in the ToS because it's almost impossible because writing what I just said will still have people going "well what's automated, where's the exact line!" when it's all pretty clear what the intended use case here is. The Anthropic peeps have said about as much. I get that the traditional dev is allergic to the concept of reading between the lines and demands everything to be spelled out explicitly, but maybe you should just see it as something to learn because it's an incredibly useful life skill.

politelemon 7mo ago

Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.

cedws 7mo ago
There’s the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code to use the models efficiently, which the subscription pricing is based on. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.
- Zetaphor 7mo ago
  Alternatively products like openclaw have an outsized impact on Anthropic's infrastructure for essentially no benefit to them. Especially when you're taking advantage of the $200 plan. OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of cash to try and capture a little more market share. They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.
  - plusplusungood 7mo ago
    > Taking advantage of the $200 plan. No, I'm paying $200 a month for a premium product that I expect premium service for. It's the single most expensive IT expense I have. Taking advantage my foot.
    - charcircuit 7mo ago
      It's not a premium product. It's just expensive.
    - infecto 7mo ago
      You are simply a bit too entitled. It's not a premium product and honestly not that expensive in my opinion either (though that is going to depend on your location). You are more than able to pay for API rates.

rlpb 7mo ago

> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs". I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

sshine 7mo ago
> Perhaps Anthropic is struggling to meet demand? Yes, definitely, they’re gracefully failing to meet demand. They could also deny new customers, but it would probably be bad for business.
- leesalminen 7mo ago
  I once decided to deny new customers in order to be able to service current demand at the quality we wanted. It backfired and made people want our product even more. Our phones were blowing up. That approach can have unintended consequences!
  - sunnybeetroot 7mo ago
    You unintentionally used a common sales tactic; by decreasing supply you increase demand.
  - ayewo 7mo ago
    Another knob you could have turned is: raise prices. Did you try this?
    - sshine 7mo ago
      Anthropic is already doing this. Signup prices seem higher now than three months ago. This is actually the least frustrating method because people who can't afford to pay are not as angry as people who paid and aren't getting served (like when sign-in emails don't arrive for hours or days), or people who have paid for a long time to suddenly see quality decrease. But it might not be best for business: Having more users than you can handle might suck, but if you're popular enough, people are still gonna put up with it.

fluidcruft 7mo ago

claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice). Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off. I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max. I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit. Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).

visarga 7mo ago
I might consider switching to codex from claude pro 20x but I need the post tool use, pre file write and post user message hooks. Waiting on codex to deliver. - pre file write -> block editing code files without a task and plan of work - post tool use -> show next open checkbox in the task to the agent, like an instruction pointer - post user message -> log all user messages for periodic review of intent alignment These 3 hooks + plain md files make my claude harness.
- glasner 7mo ago

deaux 7mo ago

> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?) How often? Realistically, if you invoke it occasionally, for what's clearly an amount that's "reasonable personal use", then no you don't get nuked.

ls612 7mo ago
It’s the same problem people have with Google. If they ban you for some AI hallucinated reason you have no recourse other than going viral on Hacker News.
- deaux 7mo ago
  I haven't seen a single case of that happening with Anthropic yet. Every time someone has gotten banned it's because they either used third party harnesses which went to great lengths to impersonate claude code (obvious evasion), or because they set things up so it maxxed out their usage 24/7. I'll change my mind when I see otherwise. And this isn't being positive about Anthropic support or their treatment of users, as I too have seen lots of people here getting billed by them for stuff they never paid for, blatant fraud. That's even worse than Google. I'm only talking about getting banned for usage.
  - oooyay 7mo ago
    I plugged this question into Claude and told it to limit me to 10: 1. Cancer patient banned mid-payment — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675740 2. Hobbyist coder, VPN trigger, forms into void for 10+ months — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286867 3. "Reinstated" but still locked out — two systems out of sync — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007408 4. Banned for testing vision API — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39988137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39988137 5. Banned on first ever prompt ("What do you know about Hacker News?") — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698788 6. Mass banning wave, some banned before first use — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39672765 7. Entire company banned without warning, thousands of users stranded — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210199 8. Forced new account (no email change support) → immediately banned — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339741 9. Banned for scaffolding a Claude.md file, support email never arrives — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384 10. $81 billing overcharge, human promised, month of silence — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679

rendaw 7mo ago

They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h. Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null). (By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)

Bolwin 7mo ago

Claude -p is allowed. They're not going to give you a feature then ban you for using it. What they changed is that it now uses extra usage, which is charged at api rates

wild_egg 7mo ago
It only switches to charging API rates if some part of your prompt triggers their magic string detector. Lot of examples of that floating around where swapping "is" for "are" or whatever will magically allow the request against your subscription plan again.
TheDong 7mo ago
"claude -p" does not charge api rates by itself, I just ran "claude -p 'write hello world to foo.txt'", and it didn't. What they changed is that if you have OpenClaw run 'claude -p' for you, that gets your account banned or charged API rates, and if they think your usage of 'claude -p' is maybe OpenClaw, even if it's not, you get charged API rates or banned. It seems so silly to me. They built a feature with one billing rate, and the feature is a bash command. If you have a bad program run the bash command, you get billed at a different rate, if you have a good script you wrote yourself run it, you're fine, but they have literally no legitimate way to tell the difference since either way it's just a command being run. The justification going around is that OpenClaw usage is so heavy that it impacts the service for other people, but like OpenClaw was just using the "claude code max" plan, so if they can't handle the usage the plan promises, they should be changing the plan. If they had instead said "Your claude code max plan, which has XX quota, will get charged API rates if you consistently use 50% of your quota. The quota is actually a lie, it's just the amount you can burst up to once or twice a week, but definitely not every day" and just banned everyone that used claude code a lot, I wouldn't be complaining as much, that'd be much more consistent.

infecto 7mo ago

Most of those are issues are coming from a very small minority. A lot of times its good for businesses to focus on the customers that are driving them the highest margin, most likely not users like yourself. 1) Nobody should expect to use OpenClaw without API usage. 2) We have known for a long time that the plans are subsidized. It was not as big of a deal but now that demand has continued to explode at a multiple and tools like OpenClaw were creating a lot of usage from a small minority of customers, prices change. Everything for me points more towards, we have made a service people really want to use and we are trying to balance a supply shortage (compute) with pricing. Nothing is stopping folks like yourself from simply paying the API rates. It is the simple no hassle way to get around any issue you are having, pay the API cost and you will have no limitations!

stefan_ 7mo ago

I think we are about a month away from a class action lawsuit, at their revenue they are a juicy target. And god knows they got the entirely self inflicted unholy combination going on, marketing & sales that borders on fraud (X times the usage of plan Y which has Z times of free tier which has unknowable "magic tokens") and then of course the actual fraud, reducing usage in fifteen different non obvious non public ways.

timtimmy 7mo ago

Perhaps Anthropic should put a freeze on new signups until they can increase capacity. This is the best kind of problem for a business, I'm cheering for them.

greenavocado 7mo ago
If there is one thing that is crystal clear, its that LLM providers will always take your money, no matter how bad the service is.
sscaryterry 7mo ago
This requires ethics.

retinaros 7mo ago

i dont know why ppl are surprised. you just need to see what they say on china, open source and fake safety blogs to understand they re not a company that devs should give their code for free to

aftbit 7mo ago

Huh I've noticed that! Opus hallucinates answers and provides contradictory reasoning to me much more regularly during the past couple of weeks than it did in February. For example, after a question about a script that used taskset and CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES to handle NUMA domains on a parallel GLUE evaluation run: >Round 2 tasks reuse GPU slots that Round 1 may still be occupying. Cola, SST-2, and QQP are small datasets and will likely finish before MNLI, but QNLI is sizable. If QNLI (GPU 3, slot 3) is still running when Round 2 launches, that's fine — they're on different slots. But more importantly, Round 2 uses slots 5/6/7 (GPUs 7/0/1), while Round 1 uses slots 0/1/2/3/4 (GPUs 4/5/2/3/6). So there's no GPU collision — you're good here actually. Disregard, this is clean.

siva7 7mo ago

Anthropic has become shady as hell in less than a few weeks. The DoD Story and the overall popularity among developers got them a huge leap over OAI but i certainly won't renew my subscription with them. The Claude SDK feels like a constant fight against its own limitations compared to Codex and other Harnesses.

rachel_rig 7mo ago
[dead]

smrtinsert 7mo ago

I will say I have noticed none of these things in my enterprise account. Is this is a known targeting of non-enterprise clients only?

mrgill 7mo ago

For what it's worth. I invoked claude -p from a script, and my account was nuked immediately. DM'd Thariq from Anthropic who admitted it was a weird classifier and would look into it, but then he never followed up. Been 13 days since I've been banned now. Very sad considering I got my whole company on Claude Code for them to just ban be like this, with no customer support response.