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Ask HN: Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do

82 points by ayi 3mo ago

After using Claude Code at work for months I wanted to use it on my own projects too. Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned after 1 hour of usage. I got my 120$ back. 1 month later I signed up with vpn off. But this time probably because I used the same credit cart (and that's the only card I can use) they banned me again. Even after I contacted support I got a generic "we have determined that we cannot reinstate your account at this time due to a violation of our Usage Policy" answer. I'm not using it for anything unusal. "Summarize that markdown file", "how can i refactor payment module" kind of questions mostly. I couldn't even move to real coding because 1 hour was only enough for investigation. My last chance is HN to get some visibility on my case. My Boris sees it or some other Anthropic employee. Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back?

iamphilrae 3mo ago
I know it’s not ideal, but why not give the main competitor a go? I have great experience of using OpenAI Codex, and frequently switch between it and Claude on a whim, often playing them off against each other to review one another’s PRs.
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
  I also recommend Z.AI's GLM 5.2 model. Its a really decent model as well.
- rglullis 3mo ago
  > why not give the main competitor a go "If Lucifer decided not to take your soul, why not throw yourself at Mammon's feet instead?" We keep asking why society got to such this stage of decay, and I need to keep reminding myself that a lot of it is people who give away so much power to sociopaths in exchange of virtual trinkets.
  - carlosjobim 3mo ago
    Rather: If your crush doesn't want to go on a date with you, ask another girl out instead of becoming a stalker.
  - danillonunes 3mo ago
    "If a company doesn't want you as a consumer you might consider go to a competitor" doesn't sound like giving them power, quite the opposite.
    - rglullis 3mo ago
      Leaving Anthropic to go to OpenAI is as pointless move as it can be. If both options you are considering are cut from the cloth, financed by the same oligarchs and playing the same game from the same elites, then the game is rigged.
      - brookst 3mo ago
        It depends whether OP is making a grandiose and principled stand rejecting the entire AI industry, the billionaires who control our society, and the complete sham that capitalism has become… or just wants to build an app without worrying about being banned again.
        rglullis 3mo ago
        Why not both.jpg? Just sign up to Ollama Cloud, use GLM-5.2. $20/month gives you something on par with Opus (if not better) with quotas so high I'm yet to hit.
  - hatradiowigwam 3mo ago
    [dead]
OsrsNeedsf2P 3mo ago
Had my account banned 6 months ago. Created a new account and have continued with no issues since
sdevonoes 3mo ago
Lucky you.
dhoe 3mo ago
Don't have a solution but just to add that I'm the same boat, and I've seen a few others. Something trips their anomaly detection and they don't care about it because it's presumably a low false positive rate. For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.
karlkloss 3mo ago
Thy're probably using their own AI to find violations. Go figure.
- thunkymonkey 3mo ago
  Almost certainly. They banned me the instant I logged in successfully, possibly because the email contains "claude.ai@". My appeals via email were ignored. 9 months later I received this, but my account is still banned when trying to log in: Earlier this week, your account was disabled by an automated system for being in violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy. Upon further investigation, we believe this was an error and your account has been reinstated. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
- sillysaurusx 3mo ago
  They do. It’s how I was banned for researching barbiturates.
PinguTS 3mo ago
Why not using some other coding IDE with OpenRouter? There you can also use the models. You can even switch models easily depending on your needs and spent. There are OpenSource versions of CodeX. For example: * OpenCode: https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-afb2b6e284e5 https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-... * CodeX with OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli
- rspoerri 3mo ago
  I dont know why people use openrouter ,instead of a monthly subscription, if they can. While i am barely able to use up my 100$ monthly subscription, i can easily spend 10$ a day on openrouter (200-300$/month). Using top-tier models on openrouter is so much more expensive from my experience then any subscription.
  - PinguTS 3mo ago
    All are moving from monthly to usage payments anyway. You use the model you need. You don't need to use always the top tier model for anything. That is your decision. You can use a top tier for planing and then the agents can use cheap Chinese models. Much more cost effective.
    - Freedumbs 3mo ago
      To create an OpenRouter account, you have to supply a phone number. Neither Anthropic or OpenAI required this. This prevents privacy aware users from signing up.
      - 2ndabdulhamid 3mo ago
        Anthropic request ID verification and OpenAI requires phone number in Europe. I don't know about other parts of the world, but I don't see any issues with OpenRouter.
sourcegrift 3mo ago
Use grok build. They've got some pretty cool things going
throwaway2027 3mo ago
Well at least you didn't submit an ID and selfie yet so you could make a new account right, the future is bright.
Littice 3mo ago
The part that would bother me most is not the ban itself, but having no idea what to change. “Policy violation” could mean VPN, billing risk, location, or actual usage.
- benj111 3mo ago
  All online services are like this. I used to sell stuff on eBay. Had multiple accounts randomly closed. Never did find out why.
  - brookst 3mo ago
    It sucks, but it comes from the learning that when you do provide specific explanations it’s really just coaching chronic abusers how to get around bans. The collateral damage of legit users who accidentally tripped the detection algorithm is accepted as the less-bad of options. Not defending it, just sharing perspective from having worked on some fraud/abuse mitigation projects.
websap 3mo ago
Just generate a virtual credit card?
colechristensen 3mo ago
There's just a lot of fraud. My bank killed my debit card for "fraud" in my attempts to pay my anthropic bill which triggered fraud alerts, I confirmed the charge was legitimate and it got flagged again. Three times until they just deleted my card.
sillysaurusx 3mo ago
I too was banned. Two key details: 1. I was unbanned via their appeal form, but 2. I had created a new account in the meantime which I’ve used since. If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.) Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out. In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.
- TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
  So you're confirming that bypassing the ban with mercury.com works?
- newdee 3mo ago
  I fear that it is a dead end once they start doing KYC via Persona.
wuhhh 3mo ago
Strange, I managed to sign up with an email alias and pretty much always have my proton vpn turned on, never had any issues with Claude code or web - maybe I’m about to? :D Been thinking of switching to a multi model harness anyway.
pyeri 3mo ago
Might not be a very popular advice or even what you're looking for, but I think Anthropic banning you (or any user for that matter) is a blessing in disguise. The sheer amount of compute resources consumed by their high reasoning "pondering..." and "bloviating..." tokens isn't sustainable at scale. Eventually, they must ban everyone but those with deep and infinite pockets in order for this model to be sustainable and turn revenues. Computers and LLMs are great at automation of low-level human cognitive tasks like memory, decisions and loops, etc. but struggle enormously with high cognitive tasks like reasoning, deep logic, nuance, etc. Not that it can't be done (Claude platform is proof that it can) - but the cost and scaling advantage in this realm belongs to the human brain, not the LLM.
- clows 3mo ago
  > Might not be a very popular advice or even what you're looking for [...] why comment then?
- Bishonen88 3mo ago
  This is as unhelpful as it gets. The genie is out of the bottle - people can create unimaginable things with claude within hours. What would take months/years can be done in a day or a week. Being banned on those platforms is a real setback for many users. One might argue that openai etc. are valid alternatives, but when they dropped fable (and perhaps reinstate?), not being able to use it simply means others can do more/better.
  - 59nadir 3mo ago
    > What would take months/years can be done in a day or a week. Hahahaha, this reads like pure unadulterated marketing. I sincerely hope you're getting paid for these things at least, it would be sad for you to be this way without even getting anything in return.
    - Bishonen88 3mo ago
      yes, I'm getting paid handsomely for delivering software faster than every before, using llm's. If you mistake that for marketing, then so be it.
throwaway63467 3mo ago
Probably they think you’re using a personal account for your company, they don’t want that as they heavily (?) subsidize personal usage.
uberex 3mo ago
Opencode, w. openrouter? Kiro.dev, w. cerebras? Aider, w. groq (with a Q)?
yenihesap 3mo ago
Just use one of the alternatives, there are so many. I recommend DeepSeek, GLM/Z-AI or Qwen. They are cheaper and offer competitive performance to Anthropic.
jonathanstrange 3mo ago
Very simple, just don't use it and switch to another model (e.g. a Chinese one).
chillfox 3mo ago
Don’t worry about it, Anthropic is banned from releasing new models anyway. Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.
- teknopaul 3mo ago
  Yeah Claude was down I tried OpenCode and it seems reliable. Any one got any experience with large projects?
  - rurban 3mo ago
    Yes. Opencode was the best, but went to shit lately. Currently omp is the best. Oh my pi
  - chillfox 3mo ago
    I have been pretty happy with OpenCode and the Go plan, but I have only been using it on small ~20k line projects so far.
ddxv 3mo ago
Deepseek models seem as good and are like 20x cheaper for me.
pembrook 3mo ago
This brings up so many issues imo. I hate the idea of government throwing its weight around based on personal vendettas (in the case of this Fable debacle), so it's clear that if this tech is going to be foundation-level important to the economy going forward, we need some sort of laws guaranteeing our access to it. But authoritarians in government aren't the only party we need to be concerned about. As shown by this post, the actual model companies themselves may have too much centralized power already. Given all software development has essentially moved to AI-first, an authoritarian-minded Anthropic/OpenAI employee is currently able to pick winners in the economy by granting/withholding access to certain groups. That is the type of thing I think needs to be regulated, not some trivial cyber security abilities in the actual models themselves. The Google-style B2C blanket ban with zero customer support approach isn't going to cut it if the models continue progressing at this rate and the lead ever widens with open source (which it likely will at some point).
- Hizonner 3mo ago
  I don't think such regulation should be restricted to AI. "Google-style B2C blanket bans" routinely ruin people's livelihoods in other ways, including, of course, when Google does it. There are way too many companies nowadays that are way too central to how way too many people live their lives. If you want to be a piece of critical infrastructure, you need to deal with the implications of that. It's not OK for private entities to be able to "unperson" people in important parts of their lives for what amounts to convenience reasons. If them not being able to do that raises the price of the service, so be it. Honestly even banks, which are already highly regulated and at least have more nominal competition, still have too much leeway to cut off customers based on error-prone statistical methods, without recourse or explanation.
phyzix5761 3mo ago
Reminds me of Google banning first time small business owners with no explanation and basically forcing them to shut down their businesses over night because without Google they couldn't find any customers. Happens way more often than people realize. Usually, the cause is something dumb like not having a link to a privacy policy clearly shown on the main page of their website but Google never explains this.
nurettin 3mo ago
I've been using both codex and claude for the past month and if anthropic acted up like that I'd switch fully to codex in a heartbeat.
leothetechguy 3mo ago
I try not to depend on these AI tools, not having them is inconvenient but I still write every line of code myself, so the speed I work at remains always the same. I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh. >I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions. I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money. Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
[flagged]
nottorp 3mo ago
Is this the new “google banned me for no reason”? Googles customer relations were “AI” before LLMs.
abalashov 3mo ago
In all seriousness, between DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K2.6 and now K2.7-Code, Xiaomi's MiMo-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3.7 Max, I haven't touched Claude for any sort of programming-related task in months. I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too. I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.
- abalashov 3mo ago
  Adding later: and of course, there's GLM 5.2 (Z.ai), which I've now had a chance to try. Holy crap. I'll grant you, I don't "one-shot" "long-horizon" tasks the way some people do, but I'd say for garden-variety agentic coding, any of these can hang with the big kids.
outime 3mo ago
At the end of the day, the only guaranteed way to retain access to LLMs is to run an open model on your own hw. Which at this time, it's often inferior but may change in the future. Also, I'll never be grateful enough for all the horror stories about Google accounts getting randomly banned - they were what finally pushed me to make a similar move.
jasonkester 3mo ago
It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country. I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me. There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning. I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.
- grebc 3mo ago
  Unless you’re on vacation what reason is there for your IP to be on a separate continent to the billing address attached to a credit card? From the POV of all the people in the payment processing chain.
  - jasonkester 3mo ago
    Because people move to different countries. There's no way to update the billing address of my US bank to a foreign address. My UK bank is in the address of my house there. My French bank is in the address of my house here. As I said, you get one and only one guess as to how the company in question wants to handle this. I want to buy Minecraft for my kid's birthday. Do I buy it from the US store with my US card because that's where I lived when I set up my Microsoft account? Do I buy it in the French store with my French card (with that US Microsoft account)? Answer: Both of those will get you permanently banned from buying Minecraft on that account. There's a Secret Third Answer, but there's no way of knowing it in advance (or even after the fact since there is no functional customer support that knows about this issue).
Figs 3mo ago
The permanent solution to this is: *Run a local model.* Why the fuck are you renting your hammer, carpenter, from assholes who will capriciously take it away from you when you need it most?!
dwb 3mo ago
Sorry, no, but I’ve been using the latest DeepSeek model for personal stuff and it’s pretty good, way cheaper, and can be used in Claude Code directly.
0xbadc0de5 3mo ago
Use the appeal form. When I got banned, it took a few months but I did get my account back. In the meantime, I switched to OpenAI. Their latest models and codex are just as good if not better in my experience.
Freedumbs 3mo ago
I use claude and codex with VPN on and off everyday on personal computer. That's not why.
Leonard_of_Q 3mo ago
I foresee an old favourite making a comeback: Learn to code This is only partly tongue-cheek. If you're using it all the time your coding skills will have declined markedly so it might be good practice to DIY when the is no time pressure or production quota.
basedrum 3mo ago
Your Boris?
28304283409234 3mo ago
Really - this is the state of the art nowadays? "I can't get to my AI for a summary of foo, please send chocolate?" Dust yourself off and open a book.
kordlessagain 3mo ago
Well, it's down hard so we're all in the same boat for now.
pixel_popping 3mo ago
For essential tools, never use your primary payment methods, always generate virtual cards, ask someone else to pass KYC for you if you are subjected to it (i.e your parents, wife or alternative networks if you know how). Never ever use your own IP for any service, sign-up straight from a shared VPN (for security & privacy reasons), the more people do this, the more they are "screwed".
Cech1337 3mo ago
[flagged]
tim-tday 3mo ago
1) Try a competitor 2) next time have a fallback 3) Stay close enough to the code that you aren’t helpless when the tools go away On the one hand humans are sort of useless without tools. On the other hand if we go limp and abdicate our ownership of our workflows we might as well be dead. I have my primary rig, a secondary and I’m installing a local model on an old gaming rig with a GPU in it.
- cindyllm 3mo ago
  [dead]
brudgers 3mo ago
that's the only card I can use That gives me a "there's probably more to this story" feeling. Though I understand that there are people without multiple credit cards, getting a second credit card and/or debit card is not difficult under ordinary circumstances. Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned This reinforces my "there's probably more to this story."
- qazxcvbnmlp 3mo ago
  Whenever I read posts like this I get the missing missing reasons vibes. https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/ https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing...
potsandpans 3mo ago
Yep it sucks. This is the consequence of what these technofeudalists are bringing to the table. I was banned from open ai under similar circumstances, right after they scaled out their payments system. I was paying through Google play, and one day account was banned. The process of appeal was crazy. First, they told me they couldn't tell me what I did wrong. Then, they said, even though they couldn't tell me what I did wrong, if I apologized for doing it they would consider the appeal. Finally, they told me that they confirmed it was due to suspicious payment activity. Just for shits and giggles, I sent a follow up email once a month for over a year. What's interesting, is my developer account is tied to a phone number. So, even though I can still pay openai under a different email (same card!) I can't access the developer account because that number is accounted for. There are a lot of people on this site that want to be skeptical and say, "hmmm there has to be more to this story." There really isn't. Unless you consider that I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat to chatgpt once, maybe that's it. This is the world these companies are building for us: absolute rent seeking behavior towards the in/put group. And if you're in the out group, you can eat shit.
kypro 3mo ago
> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do Should be: > Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code unfairly and I don't know how to appeal What does "I don't know what to do" even mean? Genuinely who cares if this happens? Its not like the old days where being banned from adsense could literally destroy your business... If this is how they treat you then screw them and just go use Codex or something. It's genuinely insane to me how many people now seem unable to function without Claude. I realised earlier I have multiple coworkers who literally could not work during the Anthropic outage. I use CC quite heavily, but I only found out about the outage after I noticed they were sending multiple messages about how they weren't able to work. Some people now seem to think that writing code by hand is a feat which humans can no longer do with any reasonable level of productivity. There's also a dude I work with who is really irritatingly running all his messages through Claude because his Slack messages have all the annoying hallmarks of Claude – e.g., "I'd like to highlight with you one very real issue [x] raised yesterday". I was trying to get hold of him during the outage and he suspiciously didn't reply until the outage was over. Until today I thought it was a bit of a meme that people were becoming dependant on AI, but I'm starting to see it everywhere at this point... > Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back? I think you're asking the wrong question. I'd consider asking why you care so much. This should be a mild inconvenience at most.
PaiDxng 3mo ago
Mine is like this too。 What should I do? It’s really frustrating。
InfinarScientia 3mo ago
Just create a different google account, and sign up with that email, its not like they IP banned you.
dhruvyads 3mo ago
You can make another account and use a virtual Revolut card for payment. Otherwise use GLM 5.2 with OpenCode or Codex.
- imhoguy 3mo ago
  Did it work for you? These cards don't work for preauth with subscription.
kyokoL 3mo ago
[dead]
PaulShin 3mo ago
[flagged]
matiscorie 3mo ago
[dead]
Amir6 3mo ago
I have been unable to use my subscription due to a similar issue since last week and still have not heard on the appeal decision. See my story below; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861
Amir6 3mo ago
[dead]
Alex_Bell 3mo ago
[flagged]

82 points by ayi 3mo ago

iamphilrae 3mo ago

I know it’s not ideal, but why not give the main competitor a go? I have great experience of using OpenAI Codex, and frequently switch between it and Claude on a whim, often playing them off against each other to review one another’s PRs.

Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
I also recommend Z.AI's GLM 5.2 model. Its a really decent model as well.
rglullis 3mo ago
> why not give the main competitor a go "If Lucifer decided not to take your soul, why not throw yourself at Mammon's feet instead?" We keep asking why society got to such this stage of decay, and I need to keep reminding myself that a lot of it is people who give away so much power to sociopaths in exchange of virtual trinkets.
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  Rather: If your crush doesn't want to go on a date with you, ask another girl out instead of becoming a stalker.
- danillonunes 3mo ago
  "If a company doesn't want you as a consumer you might consider go to a competitor" doesn't sound like giving them power, quite the opposite.
  - rglullis 3mo ago
    Leaving Anthropic to go to OpenAI is as pointless move as it can be. If both options you are considering are cut from the cloth, financed by the same oligarchs and playing the same game from the same elites, then the game is rigged.
    - brookst 3mo ago
      It depends whether OP is making a grandiose and principled stand rejecting the entire AI industry, the billionaires who control our society, and the complete sham that capitalism has become… or just wants to build an app without worrying about being banned again.
      - rglullis 3mo ago
        Why not both.jpg? Just sign up to Ollama Cloud, use GLM-5.2. $20/month gives you something on par with Opus (if not better) with quotas so high I'm yet to hit.
- hatradiowigwam 3mo ago
  [dead]

OsrsNeedsf2P 3mo ago

Had my account banned 6 months ago. Created a new account and have continued with no issues since

sdevonoes 3mo ago

Lucky you.

dhoe 3mo ago

Don't have a solution but just to add that I'm the same boat, and I've seen a few others. Something trips their anomaly detection and they don't care about it because it's presumably a low false positive rate. For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.

karlkloss 3mo ago

Thy're probably using their own AI to find violations. Go figure.

thunkymonkey 3mo ago
Almost certainly. They banned me the instant I logged in successfully, possibly because the email contains "claude.ai@". My appeals via email were ignored. 9 months later I received this, but my account is still banned when trying to log in: Earlier this week, your account was disabled by an automated system for being in violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy. Upon further investigation, we believe this was an error and your account has been reinstated. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
sillysaurusx 3mo ago
They do. It’s how I was banned for researching barbiturates.

PinguTS 3mo ago

Why not using some other coding IDE with OpenRouter? There you can also use the models. You can even switch models easily depending on your needs and spent. There are OpenSource versions of CodeX. For example: * OpenCode: https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-afb2b6e284e5 https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-... * CodeX with OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli

rspoerri 3mo ago
I dont know why people use openrouter ,instead of a monthly subscription, if they can. While i am barely able to use up my 100$ monthly subscription, i can easily spend 10$ a day on openrouter (200-300$/month). Using top-tier models on openrouter is so much more expensive from my experience then any subscription.
- PinguTS 3mo ago
  All are moving from monthly to usage payments anyway. You use the model you need. You don't need to use always the top tier model for anything. That is your decision. You can use a top tier for planing and then the agents can use cheap Chinese models. Much more cost effective.
  - Freedumbs 3mo ago
    To create an OpenRouter account, you have to supply a phone number. Neither Anthropic or OpenAI required this. This prevents privacy aware users from signing up.
    - 2ndabdulhamid 3mo ago
      Anthropic request ID verification and OpenAI requires phone number in Europe. I don't know about other parts of the world, but I don't see any issues with OpenRouter.

sourcegrift 3mo ago

Use grok build. They've got some pretty cool things going

throwaway2027 3mo ago

Well at least you didn't submit an ID and selfie yet so you could make a new account right, the future is bright.

Littice 3mo ago

The part that would bother me most is not the ban itself, but having no idea what to change. “Policy violation” could mean VPN, billing risk, location, or actual usage.

benj111 3mo ago
All online services are like this. I used to sell stuff on eBay. Had multiple accounts randomly closed. Never did find out why.
- brookst 3mo ago
  It sucks, but it comes from the learning that when you do provide specific explanations it’s really just coaching chronic abusers how to get around bans. The collateral damage of legit users who accidentally tripped the detection algorithm is accepted as the less-bad of options. Not defending it, just sharing perspective from having worked on some fraud/abuse mitigation projects.

websap 3mo ago

Just generate a virtual credit card?

colechristensen 3mo ago

There's just a lot of fraud. My bank killed my debit card for "fraud" in my attempts to pay my anthropic bill which triggered fraud alerts, I confirmed the charge was legitimate and it got flagged again. Three times until they just deleted my card.

sillysaurusx 3mo ago

I too was banned. Two key details: 1. I was unbanned via their appeal form, but 2. I had created a new account in the meantime which I’ve used since. If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.) Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out. In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.

TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
So you're confirming that bypassing the ban with mercury.com works?
newdee 3mo ago
I fear that it is a dead end once they start doing KYC via Persona.

wuhhh 3mo ago

Strange, I managed to sign up with an email alias and pretty much always have my proton vpn turned on, never had any issues with Claude code or web - maybe I’m about to? :D Been thinking of switching to a multi model harness anyway.

pyeri 3mo ago

Might not be a very popular advice or even what you're looking for, but I think Anthropic banning you (or any user for that matter) is a blessing in disguise. The sheer amount of compute resources consumed by their high reasoning "pondering..." and "bloviating..." tokens isn't sustainable at scale. Eventually, they must ban everyone but those with deep and infinite pockets in order for this model to be sustainable and turn revenues. Computers and LLMs are great at automation of low-level human cognitive tasks like memory, decisions and loops, etc. but struggle enormously with high cognitive tasks like reasoning, deep logic, nuance, etc. Not that it can't be done (Claude platform is proof that it can) - but the cost and scaling advantage in this realm belongs to the human brain, not the LLM.

clows 3mo ago
> Might not be a very popular advice or even what you're looking for [...] why comment then?
Bishonen88 3mo ago
This is as unhelpful as it gets. The genie is out of the bottle - people can create unimaginable things with claude within hours. What would take months/years can be done in a day or a week. Being banned on those platforms is a real setback for many users. One might argue that openai etc. are valid alternatives, but when they dropped fable (and perhaps reinstate?), not being able to use it simply means others can do more/better.
- 59nadir 3mo ago
  > What would take months/years can be done in a day or a week. Hahahaha, this reads like pure unadulterated marketing. I sincerely hope you're getting paid for these things at least, it would be sad for you to be this way without even getting anything in return.
  - Bishonen88 3mo ago
    yes, I'm getting paid handsomely for delivering software faster than every before, using llm's. If you mistake that for marketing, then so be it.

throwaway63467 3mo ago

Probably they think you’re using a personal account for your company, they don’t want that as they heavily (?) subsidize personal usage.

uberex 3mo ago

Opencode, w. openrouter? Kiro.dev, w. cerebras? Aider, w. groq (with a Q)?

yenihesap 3mo ago

Just use one of the alternatives, there are so many. I recommend DeepSeek, GLM/Z-AI or Qwen. They are cheaper and offer competitive performance to Anthropic.

jonathanstrange 3mo ago

Very simple, just don't use it and switch to another model (e.g. a Chinese one).

chillfox 3mo ago

Don’t worry about it, Anthropic is banned from releasing new models anyway. Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.

teknopaul 3mo ago
Yeah Claude was down I tried OpenCode and it seems reliable. Any one got any experience with large projects?
- rurban 3mo ago
  Yes. Opencode was the best, but went to shit lately. Currently omp is the best. Oh my pi
- chillfox 3mo ago
  I have been pretty happy with OpenCode and the Go plan, but I have only been using it on small ~20k line projects so far.

ddxv 3mo ago

Deepseek models seem as good and are like 20x cheaper for me.

pembrook 3mo ago

This brings up so many issues imo. I hate the idea of government throwing its weight around based on personal vendettas (in the case of this Fable debacle), so it's clear that if this tech is going to be foundation-level important to the economy going forward, we need some sort of laws guaranteeing our access to it. But authoritarians in government aren't the only party we need to be concerned about. As shown by this post, the actual model companies themselves may have too much centralized power already. Given all software development has essentially moved to AI-first, an authoritarian-minded Anthropic/OpenAI employee is currently able to pick winners in the economy by granting/withholding access to certain groups. That is the type of thing I think needs to be regulated, not some trivial cyber security abilities in the actual models themselves. The Google-style B2C blanket ban with zero customer support approach isn't going to cut it if the models continue progressing at this rate and the lead ever widens with open source (which it likely will at some point).

Hizonner 3mo ago
I don't think such regulation should be restricted to AI. "Google-style B2C blanket bans" routinely ruin people's livelihoods in other ways, including, of course, when Google does it. There are way too many companies nowadays that are way too central to how way too many people live their lives. If you want to be a piece of critical infrastructure, you need to deal with the implications of that. It's not OK for private entities to be able to "unperson" people in important parts of their lives for what amounts to convenience reasons. If them not being able to do that raises the price of the service, so be it. Honestly even banks, which are already highly regulated and at least have more nominal competition, still have too much leeway to cut off customers based on error-prone statistical methods, without recourse or explanation.

phyzix5761 3mo ago

Reminds me of Google banning first time small business owners with no explanation and basically forcing them to shut down their businesses over night because without Google they couldn't find any customers. Happens way more often than people realize. Usually, the cause is something dumb like not having a link to a privacy policy clearly shown on the main page of their website but Google never explains this.

nurettin 3mo ago

I've been using both codex and claude for the past month and if anthropic acted up like that I'd switch fully to codex in a heartbeat.

leothetechguy 3mo ago

I try not to depend on these AI tools, not having them is inconvenient but I still write every line of code myself, so the speed I work at remains always the same. I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh. >I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions. I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money. Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!

deleted 3mo ago
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TurdF3rguson 3mo ago

[flagged]

nottorp 3mo ago

Is this the new “google banned me for no reason”? Googles customer relations were “AI” before LLMs.

abalashov 3mo ago

In all seriousness, between DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K2.6 and now K2.7-Code, Xiaomi's MiMo-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3.7 Max, I haven't touched Claude for any sort of programming-related task in months. I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too. I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.

abalashov 3mo ago
Adding later: and of course, there's GLM 5.2 (Z.ai), which I've now had a chance to try. Holy crap. I'll grant you, I don't "one-shot" "long-horizon" tasks the way some people do, but I'd say for garden-variety agentic coding, any of these can hang with the big kids.

outime 3mo ago

At the end of the day, the only guaranteed way to retain access to LLMs is to run an open model on your own hw. Which at this time, it's often inferior but may change in the future. Also, I'll never be grateful enough for all the horror stories about Google accounts getting randomly banned - they were what finally pushed me to make a similar move.

jasonkester 3mo ago

It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country. I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me. There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning. I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.

grebc 3mo ago
Unless you’re on vacation what reason is there for your IP to be on a separate continent to the billing address attached to a credit card? From the POV of all the people in the payment processing chain.
- jasonkester 3mo ago
  Because people move to different countries. There's no way to update the billing address of my US bank to a foreign address. My UK bank is in the address of my house there. My French bank is in the address of my house here. As I said, you get one and only one guess as to how the company in question wants to handle this. I want to buy Minecraft for my kid's birthday. Do I buy it from the US store with my US card because that's where I lived when I set up my Microsoft account? Do I buy it in the French store with my French card (with that US Microsoft account)? Answer: Both of those will get you permanently banned from buying Minecraft on that account. There's a Secret Third Answer, but there's no way of knowing it in advance (or even after the fact since there is no functional customer support that knows about this issue).

Figs 3mo ago

The permanent solution to this is: *Run a local model.* Why the fuck are you renting your hammer, carpenter, from assholes who will capriciously take it away from you when you need it most?!

dwb 3mo ago

Sorry, no, but I’ve been using the latest DeepSeek model for personal stuff and it’s pretty good, way cheaper, and can be used in Claude Code directly.

0xbadc0de5 3mo ago

Use the appeal form. When I got banned, it took a few months but I did get my account back. In the meantime, I switched to OpenAI. Their latest models and codex are just as good if not better in my experience.

Freedumbs 3mo ago

I use claude and codex with VPN on and off everyday on personal computer. That's not why.

Leonard_of_Q 3mo ago

I foresee an old favourite making a comeback: Learn to code This is only partly tongue-cheek. If you're using it all the time your coding skills will have declined markedly so it might be good practice to DIY when the is no time pressure or production quota.

basedrum 3mo ago

Your Boris?

28304283409234 3mo ago

Really - this is the state of the art nowadays? "I can't get to my AI for a summary of foo, please send chocolate?" Dust yourself off and open a book.

kordlessagain 3mo ago

Well, it's down hard so we're all in the same boat for now.

pixel_popping 3mo ago

For essential tools, never use your primary payment methods, always generate virtual cards, ask someone else to pass KYC for you if you are subjected to it (i.e your parents, wife or alternative networks if you know how). Never ever use your own IP for any service, sign-up straight from a shared VPN (for security & privacy reasons), the more people do this, the more they are "screwed".

Cech1337 3mo ago

[flagged]

tim-tday 3mo ago

1) Try a competitor 2) next time have a fallback 3) Stay close enough to the code that you aren’t helpless when the tools go away On the one hand humans are sort of useless without tools. On the other hand if we go limp and abdicate our ownership of our workflows we might as well be dead. I have my primary rig, a secondary and I’m installing a local model on an old gaming rig with a GPU in it.

cindyllm 3mo ago
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brudgers 3mo ago

that's the only card I can use That gives me a "there's probably more to this story" feeling. Though I understand that there are people without multiple credit cards, getting a second credit card and/or debit card is not difficult under ordinary circumstances. Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned This reinforces my "there's probably more to this story."

qazxcvbnmlp 3mo ago
Whenever I read posts like this I get the missing missing reasons vibes. https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons/ https://issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing...

potsandpans 3mo ago

Yep it sucks. This is the consequence of what these technofeudalists are bringing to the table. I was banned from open ai under similar circumstances, right after they scaled out their payments system. I was paying through Google play, and one day account was banned. The process of appeal was crazy. First, they told me they couldn't tell me what I did wrong. Then, they said, even though they couldn't tell me what I did wrong, if I apologized for doing it they would consider the appeal. Finally, they told me that they confirmed it was due to suspicious payment activity. Just for shits and giggles, I sent a follow up email once a month for over a year. What's interesting, is my developer account is tied to a phone number. So, even though I can still pay openai under a different email (same card!) I can't access the developer account because that number is accounted for. There are a lot of people on this site that want to be skeptical and say, "hmmm there has to be more to this story." There really isn't. Unless you consider that I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat to chatgpt once, maybe that's it. This is the world these companies are building for us: absolute rent seeking behavior towards the in/put group. And if you're in the out group, you can eat shit.

kypro 3mo ago

> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do Should be: > Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code unfairly and I don't know how to appeal What does "I don't know what to do" even mean? Genuinely who cares if this happens? Its not like the old days where being banned from adsense could literally destroy your business... If this is how they treat you then screw them and just go use Codex or something. It's genuinely insane to me how many people now seem unable to function without Claude. I realised earlier I have multiple coworkers who literally could not work during the Anthropic outage. I use CC quite heavily, but I only found out about the outage after I noticed they were sending multiple messages about how they weren't able to work. Some people now seem to think that writing code by hand is a feat which humans can no longer do with any reasonable level of productivity. There's also a dude I work with who is really irritatingly running all his messages through Claude because his Slack messages have all the annoying hallmarks of Claude – e.g., "I'd like to highlight with you one very real issue [x] raised yesterday". I was trying to get hold of him during the outage and he suspiciously didn't reply until the outage was over. Until today I thought it was a bit of a meme that people were becoming dependant on AI, but I'm starting to see it everywhere at this point... > Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back? I think you're asking the wrong question. I'd consider asking why you care so much. This should be a mild inconvenience at most.

PaiDxng 3mo ago

Mine is like this too。 What should I do? It’s really frustrating。

InfinarScientia 3mo ago

Just create a different google account, and sign up with that email, its not like they IP banned you.

dhruvyads 3mo ago

You can make another account and use a virtual Revolut card for payment. Otherwise use GLM 5.2 with OpenCode or Codex.

imhoguy 3mo ago
Did it work for you? These cards don't work for preauth with subscription.

kyokoL 3mo ago

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PaulShin 3mo ago

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matiscorie 3mo ago

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Amir6 3mo ago

I have been unable to use my subscription due to a similar issue since last week and still have not heard on the appeal decision. See my story below; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597861

Amir6 3mo ago

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Alex_Bell 3mo ago

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