5 ms·
That's malicious and I think this is scamming from the literal money (you didn't do anything wrong, you executed one command and they scammed you out of the fai
by subscribed 6mo ago
That's malicious and I think this is scamming from the literal money (you didn't do anything wrong, you executed one command and they scammed you out of the fair usage you paid for).
Please raise the ticket or at least GitHub issue for visibility.
Sooner or later some sort of complaint to the relevant trade authority should happen - this is a scam operation at this point.
- otterley 6mo agoThere are many possible explanations for this outcome to have occurred other than malice. If you're an engineer by trade, consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend. Probably a lot. How about we turn down the heat, everyone?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bad_haircut72 6mo agoYeah they probably just typed in "Hey Claude, figure out a way to get our inference spend under control - no mistakes!" and shipped it
- gjsman-1000 6mo agoAlso they ain't wrong. In what other context does OpenClaw get mentioned? "You may not use our service if you mention OpenClaw" is a harsh line but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction (i.e. no use allowed for high-stakes financial modeling). Don't like it, cancel your plan.
- rv64imafdc 6mo ago> is a harsh line But that's the thing -- there is no line! Where is this specified? How can we know what service restrictions there are? For all I know, my plan could be exhausted at any point during the workday just because I happened to touch on some keyword Anthropic has decided to ban. > Don't like it, cancel your plan. Ah, but I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity? That the arbitrary enclosure of the collective intelligence was for our own good? These concepts are not compatible.
- gjsman-1000 6mo agoWhen you signed up, you agreed you understood the line - which is whatever Anthropic decides the line is. Legally, the line hasn't changed at all, nor has your moral position relative to Anthropic. Don't like it, cancel, but it was always the deal. This is, by the way, the same legal principle that the website you are posting on, right now, uses. Some uses are prohibited. Not every line need be explicit. You aren't allowed to smack talk Y Combinator or the moderators without possibly being banned for life, and you certainly do not have a legal case if they do.
- StilesCrisis 6mo agoDo you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason? People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.
- bachmeier 6mo ago> Do you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason? > People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it. Unfortunately, in the US, they can. I'm not a lawyer working in this area, but my understanding is that companies are in general free to stop doing business with any customer at any time (other than reasons like the race of the customer). And in this type of transaction, there is no obligation to give a refund when they cut off the business relationship. This is different from a business-to-business contract or other types of contracts. This type of sale you're generally out of luck if the business cuts you off. That's why Amazon can delete the music library they sold you and give you no compensation.
- echoangle 6mo agoThey can not prolong the contract but obviously they still have to provide the service you already paid for. Imagine paying for 1 year of Netflix and one week later Netflix decides to cut you off. Does that make sense?
- macNchz 6mo agoThere are plenty of ways you could wind up with a git commit containing "OpenClaw" despite zero interaction with OpenClaw itself...adding a blog post to a static site repo, or even a clause in your own app's ToS disallowing use of OpenClaw with your API.
- teiferer 6mo agoSomebody elses repo that you cloned can contain lots of fun things.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoThere's a lot of people making tools for coding with LLMs and those have a high chance of mentioning OpenClaw somewhere.
- skywhopper 6mo agoWhere is this restriction documented?
- grayhatter 6mo ago> but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction Intentionally (or negligently) anti-competitive behavior is illegal in the US. > Don't like it, cancel your plan. Don't like being abused by a company? Just pretend it's not happening! Anyone else exactly as smart as you were, they deserve to be cheated out of their money too!
- NetOpWibby 6mo agoNuance? Ignorance vs malice? You think too highly of folks.
- rv64imafdc 6mo agoThere's been a sustained pattern of incidents. If Anthropic were truly serious about not wanting to take people's money, then they would have put in place whatever review processes were necessary to stop this from happening. So regardless of whether or not they specifically intend to cause harm, they're willingly letting it happen, which is just about as bad. Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.
- loloquwowndueo 6mo agoEven with the best of faiths, this is at the very least a shoddily vibe coded “detect and low-key block attempts to use Claude for Openclaw” - it decided to look for specific strings wrapped in json without realizing this doesn’t always imply it’s an actual payload for Openclaw itself. And the human driving it was too dumb to review/catch this bad inplementation. So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers. (I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)
- teiferer 6mo ago> was too dumb to review Yolo ship it! Move fast and break things. Reviewing just slows everybody down. Nobody can keep up with those coding agents output any longer. /s
- ceejayoz 6mo ago> How about we turn down the heat, everyone? The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.
- otterley 6mo agoI agree that their support is abysmal, and that is intentional. It's unfortunate that the greater market doesn't seem to care that much right now.
- nickthegreek 6mo agoAnd the stealing of $200 here? More non malice? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issuecomment-4320819355 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...
- otterley 6mo agoLast I heard, the money is being refunded.
- nickthegreek 6mo agoI do a see a tweet saying something about that, which I had to search for and only did because of your post. But remember, this only came about after denying him the refund first (while thanking him for the 'bug' and told they would fix the problem) and it going viral on HN and X. I'm sure they will proactively reach out to everyone who was affected without any need on the users part and make everyone whole....
- subscribed 6mo agoOnly because the issue got very public and it started to stink. Not because they scammed him.
- throwaw12 6mo ago> How about we turn down the heat, everyone? How about Anthropic turn down the heat and refunds money to everyone for every bug it created with its LLM?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rohansood15 6mo agoI am engineer by trade. If I pushed an update which wrongly busted my customer's usage limits at a trillion dollar company, I would expect to get fired. Alongside my EM.
- jonahx 6mo agoRegardless of your expectations (I'm not criticizing them), that is just not how it works at most American companies. Especially not for your manager.
- rohansood15 6mo agoYou're right. They'd prefer to fire 7% of their team that did nothing wrong instead.
- sumeno 6mo agoDid Anthropic announce layoffs that I missed?
- skywhopper 6mo agoThey will by next year.
- michaelmrose 6mo agoI would expect someone would be critiqued to avoid it re-occurring and the persons money to be refunded. A company which fires so trivially will quickly flush institutional knowledge and team cohesion along with eating substantial recruitment costs.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 6mo agoThis is not how any engineering workplace anywhere operates.
- Jcampuzano2 6mo agoThis would have been easy to say if it was the first time it or something similar happened. But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.
- surgical_fire 6mo agoHow about no? Why should we coddle a corporations when they screw over customers? It matters very little if they did this out of incompetence or malice.
- teiferer 6mo agoWell this regex nonsense was likely vibe coded. If it escaped quality checks then this is a testament to how dangerous things coming out of Anthropic are, but not in the scifi sense that their CEO tries to make everybody believe.
- verdverm 6mo agoThis is not the first, nor likely last, of behavior like this. My personal story is that I bought $50 of credit into their system, didn't use it all that much, and then after a year had gone by they kept the leftovers. I consider that a kind of theft.
- grayhatter 6mo ago> consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend. Through some amount of carelessness that ended up costing people money? 0. Maybe 1 if you want to count the automated monthly charging system that did over charge (extra erroneous charges for the same month) a handful of clients too many times. I noticed before anyone else did, and all of those 1am charges were reversed before 4am. So I don't think that one counts because it was a boring bug that would have been very bad if I wasn't paying attention. Incompetence to the point of negligence can reasonably be considered malicious. If you're an engineer by trade, you have an ethical and professional responsibility to make sure things like this can't happen. And then, when bugs introduce said complications, fixing them, and remediating the damage.
- skywhopper 6mo agoNah, however this was implemented this was a clear and obvious probable side effect. If they want to block the access at the mention of openclaw, that’s silly but mostly harmless, but why charge extra for an ambiguous case? At best that’s incredibly lazy, which for a company with as much money, influence, and power as Anthropic, is equivalent to malice.
- subscribed 6mo agoLooking at the investigation details this is not a mistake. And I am a engineer by trade and if I made an actual mistake costing our customer real money, this would be refunded by the company. My company wouldn't say "oh yeah, our bad, f* off" And I'm certain I didn't caused any bugs like this.
- kitsune1 6mo ago[dead]
- intrasight 6mo agoNo. Hanlon's razor applies here.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo agoYou lose little by assuming malicious intent when it comes to billion-dollar tech companies and your money. They can prove otherwise by remedying the situation.
- tedivm 6mo agoWhen it comes to understanding large organizations I think a simple principle should apply: The Purpose of a System is What it Does[1]. Whether malicious or not, the system does what it does. If people wanted it to do something else they would change the system. The reality is that when corporations make mistakes that benefit them those mistakes rarely get fixed without some sort of public outcry, turning the "mistake" into a "feature". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- pegasus 6mo agoIntriguing concept, but I feel it needlessly breaks language. A more narrow (and to me, less pompous) formulation would be that social groups have their own purpose, different from (though not unrelated to) the purposes of the individual members. And this collective purpose can be read best from the actions of the collective, just like the purpose of a person is best divined from their actions (actions speak louder than words). More about where I think Stafford Beer goes wrong here: https://gemini.google.com/share/9a14f90f096e https://gemini.google.com/share/9a14f90f096e
- dgb23 6mo agoThe insight for me is that the assumptions of system need to be stated, not just the intent.
- 6mo ago
- wotsdat 6mo ago[dead]
- ifwinterco 6mo agoAt this point everyone doing these kind of flows (using claws or any other flows that run agents in a loop 24/7) using any kind of subscription-based billing for inference must be aware they're on borrowed time. Enough people have gone over the economics - you're costing OpenAI/Anthropic money, potentially a lot of money, so it's inevitable that sooner or later that particular party will come to an end. Having said that, doing it by running a regex on your prompts to look for keywords is a bit loose
- AstroBen 6mo agoThe only reasonable thing to do if you care about the longevity of your workflow is to build it around open-weight models. If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.
- AlotOfReading 6mo agoThe demo above uses the prompt "hi". The openclaw string is in the git history, which Claude goes looking for.
- ifwinterco 6mo agoYou're right, didn't read that properly. Okay then that actually makes sense if that's a (relatively) deterministic way to work out if openclaw is used
- halJordan 6mo agoWe all get the "realpolitik" of it. That doesn't mean anthropic just gets to ignore the contract they signed. Well it does as long as you're fighting the fight for them before it even gets to anthropic.
- kenmacd 6mo ago> scamming from the literal money That's par the course for Anthropic. I added some money to my account before I really had a use case for product. A year later they said my money had expired and when I contacted support they basically told me to pound sand. This while they have the audacity to list one of their corporate values as 'Be good to our users'. They'll never get another dollar from me.
- mananaysiempre 6mo agoEverybody does that, the only question is how much time they give you. The issue, as far as I remember hearing, is that in the US expiring company credit can be immediately recorded as income, whereas indefinite-term credit only becomes income once the user spends it.
- frankchn 6mo agoGift cards generally cannot expire until 5 years after activation in the United States (CARD Act 2009), so I would have wanted a similar time period here at least.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kenmacd 6mo agoNot true of non-US companies. I had also added money to Deepseek, and it was still there (and Z.ai and Moonshot are the same). I'm reasonable though, if it's been 5 years or something I might have understood, but it was 1 year and the account was in use during that time. Where I live (in Canada) it's actually illegal for gift cards to ever expire, and there's lots available from US companies, so if it's an accounting issue other companies have figured it out.
- chillfox 6mo agoI put $20 on Mistral and Deepinfra several years ago, and it’s still there.
- 6mo ago
- sleepybrett 6mo ago'we know we sold you 50 gallons of gas, but you are only allowed to use 40 gallons.'
- olyjohn 6mo agoNobody ever uses more than 40 gallons though. So if you do, you're abusing the system.
- LocalH 6mo agoSo making someone pay for 10 gallons of gas they're not allowed to use is fine with you?
- subscribed 6mo agoIf I'm making a lot of short journeys in the heavy traffic I'm using a lot more than someone who commutes 20 miles on the quiet country roads. Your assumption that having higher use is abuse is malicious and wrong. It may be uncommon but it's as legitimate as someone's else.
- lmm 6mo ago> Sooner or later some sort of complaint to the relevant trade authority should happen - this is a scam operation at this point. I'm sure both people left at that trade authority will get right on with investigating.