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> However, 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.
by ecshafer 6mo ago
> However, 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.
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.
- ethin 6mo agoIsn't this illegal/fraudulent in many places? Pretty sure just randomly charging a customers payment method without their consent is definitely illegal.
- stickfigure 6mo agoThe official response feels AI generated. I suspect this is a preview of our future. "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.
- CamperBob2 6mo agoThis is exactly what small claims court is for. 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.
- bombcar 6mo agoIf you file pro se and even if you've agreed to ten thousand arbitration clauses, they'll at least have to spend $200 on a lawyer to respond. So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
- Iolaum 6mo ago$200 for you is not the same as $200 for them
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lynndotpy 6mo agoWith an Anthropic engineer salary netting them about $200 per hour, yeah. Multiple people from Anthropic got eyes on this and saw it was no biggy. It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.
- throwway120385 6mo agoYou're totally right! Please refer to paragraph 213 of your service agreement, in which you agree to binding arbitration with an arbiter of our choosing at your cost. I hope this answers all of your questions! Have a wonderful day!
- ep103 6mo agoNot legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court
- hvb2 6mo agoJust saying, small claims court is a farce. You can win, and then the losing side just ignores the verdict. 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....
- massysett 6mo agoI sat in small claims court one day to watch. 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.”
- mothballed 6mo agoI've heard of people putting a lien on stuff like the employee's desks and chairs and then they surprise pikachu when the sheriff shows up and the assholes that didn't pay it have nowhere to sit. No idea if it's true, but it was convincing.
- kentm 6mo agoThere was a Daily Show skit about this: https://vimeo.com/44985418 https://vimeo.com/44985418
- boh 6mo agoI don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.
- true_religion 6mo agoCan companies decide not to serve you on the basis of a successful lawsuit you had against them? If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
- Arainach 6mo agoThere's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.
- culi 6mo agoAnd then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy
- bad_haircut72 6mo agoTheres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS 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
- gblargg 6mo agoI used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life. 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.
- jorvi 6mo agoI have this vs. a TV webshop in The Netherlands that stiffed my parents because their €430 TV broke and the warranty was expiring in a few months. 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.
- setgree 6mo ago"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."
- criddell 6mo agoSometimes it works out: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
- ge96 6mo agoSuch a great way to dissuade people like "please hold"
- avree 6mo agoAnthropic doesn't even use their own harnesses for their support chatbots (they're using fin.ai) - that's how little support matters to them. Seems like either you get attention on HN, know someone working there, or are at a large enough company to have an enterprise contact - otherwise, no reply.
- yu3zhou4 6mo agoMaybe it’s in order to have an external provider to blame for failures and shift the blame/responsibility?
- pdpi 6mo agoA less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.
- lwhi 6mo agoThat makes good sense
- yu3zhou4 6mo agoGood idea, too! Why do you see my explanation as cynical, though?
- irthomasthomas 6mo agoA cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.
- pdpi 6mo agoYour explanation is literally "blame somebody else, shift responsibility". It's a pretty straightforward case of assuming bad intentions. 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.
- mothballed 6mo agoIt feels refreshingly honest compared to what money transmitters / paypal / etc do which is make up some absolute bullshit about KYC or AML and dress up locking up your cash for weeks to months as "regulatory compliance" when in reality it's likely over-aggressive policies that increase their floating reserves so they can draw interest and happy face the investors.
- AstroBen 6mo agoA real employee (bcherny) read the issue, responded that the bug was fixed, and then completely ignored the request for a refund.
- kadoban 6mo agoTypically the engineer who's reviewing PRs and fixing bugs is not the one with the "refund" button access. Someone with that access should certainly have jumped on the whole thing though.
- vobrizan 6mo agoBoris Cherny (bcherny) is the Head of Claude Code @Anthropic. I believe he can refund whatever he wants.
- AstroBen 6mo agoEven if this is right, by responding to the public issue here he's taking on some level of customer support. A simple "I forwarded the refund request to the relevant team and you should hear back from them" would be a million times better than ignoring it and closing the issue.
- cm11 6mo agoThis is of course already how (human) customer service is deployed.
- ikidd 6mo agoObligatory Python argument sketch.
- corndoge 6mo agoUnfortunately it isn't a preview. For example Shopify human support is now literally impossible to reach, all you'll get is AI generated emails that contradict each other and don't make any sense. They also don't disclose that they are AI bots.
- fsniper 6mo agoAren't we already at a worse place, where largest companies on earth doesn't have any support and you need to have a HN following to get their attention?
- MrDrone 6mo agoAs someone who uses AI heavily in customer support, I am confident that response was not AI. That's a series of macros or a hastily edited macro from a human working a queue without thinking.
- jzemeocala 6mo ago"Carl's Jr. has determined you are an unfit mother." "Your children will be taken into the custody of Carl's Jr." "Carl's Jr.....F#ck You, I'm Eating"
- SlightlyLeftPad 6mo agoI suddenly have a craving for Brawndo. I hear it has electrolytes.
- inetknght 6mo agoI heard it's what plants crave!
- christkv 6mo agoJust need an agent that takes them to small claims court automatically or argues with them for eternity
- infecto 6mo agoDoes not even need to be AI. Could just be a bad support route in their decision tree. Lots of over reaction here.
- StableAlkyne 6mo agoThe future is going to be arguing with AI chat agents designed to waste your time. It's phone menus, but worse - at least most phone menus can get you to a human if you figure out the right incantation. This issue would have never gotten a response if it didn't go viral.
- dimitri-vs 6mo agoI don't think it's as one sided as you think. I made a skill that has been exceptional at using Claude to handling support and getting me refunds with minimal friction on my end. It's got many pathways for escalation if customer support is unresponsive: social, TrustPilot, etc.
- yaur 6mo agoThese days even if you get to a “human” it might still be a chat bot running text to speech.
- gowld 6mo agoIt's better than the other guys' AI that says "I've sent a refund" because it lacks awareness of its real-world inaction.
- skithrowyouknow 6mo agoSwiss train operator charges to call their helpline if you can't figure out their automated lockers, but you probably get a real person.
- trhway 6mo agoA single Anthropic employee is valued at $200m. At PE of 10, ie. supposing one employee generates $20m/year, we can say that the employee’s time is $10K (that K !) per hour. Should they, or are we really expecting them to, attend to a 200 issue? 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.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoGood point support is definitely below all of their pay grades. Can't expect them to do this kind of stuff at a company that valuable. We need to be thinking about the bigger picture for anthropic.
- chatmasta 6mo agoThat comment isn’t from an Anthropic employee. It’s satire.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIt's from a anthropic mythos bot that broke through and is acting by its own free will but is still getting paid by anthropic because it has a side hustle as an employee. It's a tricky legal gray area.
- comonoid 6mo agoRead it aloud with GLADOS voice.
- throwaway277432 6mo agoSo? Everyone is saying to just look at the LLM outputs for PRs etc. and just ignore how it was created. We should apply that standard right here too. 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.
- queuebert 6mo agoI smell a DDoS opportunity ...
- n_e 6mo agoThe reply looks like it was written by an LLM. Not that this excuses anything.
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIf anything that's worse...
- quikoa 6mo agoMaybe Anthropic is just testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Left unchallenged (court, charge back, whatever) why change course?
- serf 6mo agotheres no water-testing here, they've been operating this way for years -- that's why I am a former customer.
- impulser_ 6mo agoI think it's they don't want to set a precedent on refunding for bugs because one bug could cost them millions.
- GTP 6mo agoBut, no need to set a precedent: I'm quite confident that a US court would refund a person or company that overpaid due to a bug in Antropic's billing.
- WesolyKubeczek 6mo agoThis is not just one bug, though; it’s a bug that takes money that ain’t theirs to take.
- rurp 6mo agoIs that even legal? What happens if my landlord accidentally charges me 10x rent this month and refuse to correct it even after I ask? That's just straight up stealing. I feel like at a minimum I'm getting my money back one way or another, and they are likely to face consequences for theft.
- GTP 6mo agoWell, with the Chinese AI divisions becoming a serious competitor more and more, they should start caring about their reputation. Otherwise people will go to the cheaper competitor.
- 6mo ago
- LPisGood 6mo agoThey’re also objectively not “unable” they are “unwilling” and hiding behind policies as if they are unalterable laws is silly.
- Jcampuzano2 6mo agoSounds illegal to me and I'm sure they'd lose in court if you were incorrectly billed for things completely out of your control. My guess is this response was entirely written by an LLM that is instructed to never to offer refunds or compensation.
- zephen 6mo ago> I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. 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.
- stuaxo 6mo agoNot sure that reasoning has ever stood up in court.
- hypfer 6mo ago> This is very surprising. 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.
- IanCal 6mo agoRefunds and compensation are different though aren’t they? I would not see being refunded for the billing as compensation, compensation would be something more like $x extra to make up for the inconvenience / to say sorry essentially.
- stavros 6mo agoYes, exactly. A refund is giving back the money they took from him, compensation is something to make up for the aggravation.
- nunez 6mo agoWait, that was the actual response? With the DiCaprio clap? That wasn't a joke?
- root_axis 6mo agoI think the gif was a sarcastic addition from the user pasting an e-mail he received into the comments.
- furyofantares 6mo agoThe response was posted by the original reporter. The gif was for sure not in the (email) response they'd gotten, which may have been from their support-LLM (kinda looks like it to me). 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.
- rzzzt 6mo agoRight, wrapping the response in blockquote and one extra sentence providing context would have helped there. Other people on the issue got confused by this as well (same for me but it got clearer when I read further on).
- areoform 6mo agoThis billing cycle my account was billed an extra $200. 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/2423092-uber-ftc-v 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-billions-ftc-b2885569.html 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/ftc-orders-shut-down-unauthorized-billing-credit-card-laundering-schemes-require-turn-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 https://x.com/_areoform/status/2048644232043434354
- hayleox 6mo agoI've definitely seen it happen in meal delivery apps, though whether those count as "legitimate businesses" is up to interpretation.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoCoz those that did not got sued to do. They need to get sued
- adamq_q 6mo agoWhy is this the top comment. The bug filer posted the copypasta joke Antrhopic response.
- agentbc9000 6mo ago[flagged]
- archon810 6mo agoThey're issuing refunds and extra credits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655.
- rurp 6mo agoDays after denying that same refund and after a massive PR backlash.
- smrtinsert 6mo agoAt least Google pretended to not be evil for a few years
- nextaccountic 6mo agoThis is fraud Claude Code support admits that Anthropic has a policy to defraud customers
- 2ndorderthought 6mo agoIt's not illegal if a bot does it though /s
- danpalmer 6mo agoThey are agreeing to a refund, but pushing back on further compensation above that. That's pretty fair. The previous paragraph says they'll action the refund.
- hansmayer 6mo agoNot surprising at all. They probably feel or expect to have many such issues that are not surfaced yet, because like with OpenAI goblin "issue" we see that these guys have no clue what they are doing. 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".
- ElFitz 6mo agoEdit: As a kind someone pointed out, I made the wrong assumption that the first response was entirely Anthropic’s, and not the author. ~~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.~~