5 ms·

My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team. Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned he

by cle 1mo ago

My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team. Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.

nullocator 1mo ago
But Philippines is on Anthropics list of allowed countries?
- nullsanity 1mo ago
  [dead]
- wahnfrieden 1mo ago
  It was flagged for account-sharing, or detecting a compromised account
  - Grimburger 1mo ago
    How do you know there wasn't account sharing though? I've seen some amazingly dodgy stuff when hiring people from south east Asia, sharing a paid account with friends worth a months rent there seems milquetoast in comparison.
    - svachalek 1mo ago
      There clearly was account sharing, someone logged into the wife's account from the Phillipines.
      - weird-eye-issue 1mo ago
        You aren't supposed to add other users to your Team plan?
      - jurgenburgen 1mo ago
        The core complaint was that it took weeks for Anthropic support to restore access. For a startup that might as well be years.
      - deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      - techpression 1mo ago
        Well a VA would need access to her account, just like how they would need email access etc. But Anthropic has clearly picked the enterprise side of things, small teams and startups without millions of dollars in token budgets are irrelevant to them. I’m surprised they even got their account back to be honest.
        thaanpaa 1mo ago
        And yet enterprises will be the first to move to on-prem LLMs as soon as they become feasible. The next generation of TPU chips already promises 5x efficiency and enough RAM to run a 1TB+ model, and Kimi K3 is about as good as Fable for a lot of tasks, so we'll be there much sooner than anyone anticipated.
        techpression 1mo ago
        One can only hope, it would be great for everyone, myself included (the company I work for rather)
      - cle 1mo ago
        The VA had her own account on the Team plan.
    - coldtea 1mo ago
      >How do you know there wasn't account sharing though? Even if it was, it should be able to be sorted, maybe pay some overcharge or explain, and have your fucking business access re-instated.
      - anon373839 1mo ago
        This is such a tough problem. Anthropic would need access to some kind of technology that could, like, intelligently handle unforeseen circumstances and nuances. Yeah, that’s definitely not something we should expect of them.
        antonvs 1mo ago
        It’s interesting how much Anthropic itself is a demonstration that its own hype is false.
        serial_dev 1mo ago
        Just use any product going all in on AI hype. In 5 minutes you will see annoying bugs, server is down, non-sensical press releases, confusing UI. This is GitHub, this is Cursor, this is Anthropic, this is Google, this is all of them.
        Forgeties79 1mo ago
        Not to mention if their tools were so clearly useful they wouldn’t spend so much time making UI updates designed to force, trick, or confuse me into using their tool when it wasn’t my intention. SaaS companies with assistant integrations are the worst about this (looking at you, HubSpot)
        coldtea 1mo ago
        Including most of vide coded apps one sees, even from people who they'd trust before. Anecdotal example, I downloaded a new alerting app recently from an indie dev who had a small following back in the day in iOS space. It asked for a subscription, like $20/year. I thought, let me try this the (final version, from Mac App Store) app first. Well, it's a barely-there vibecoded shit. There's a bare-bones list, everything looks like my nephew designed it, the macOS "app" is a iPhone-size view of the iOS one, it has a bug that if you click on it it opens multiple duplicates of the same list view for no reason that you have to manually close, and in general it barely works. Yay for vibe coding.
    - PunchyHamster 1mo ago
      why does that matter ? Why does that block entire corporate account not a given user ? Use your brain
  - rhdunn 1mo ago
    I had my GMail account locked for 1-2 years because I accessed it from my parents house (in the same country but in a different county) while on holiday. That was because they detected the account being used from a different IP address. Using VPNs can also trip this.
    - willmadden 1mo ago
      Interesting, I only use VPNs and have never had an issue other than constant "prove that it is you" secondary authentication.
kbrannigan 1mo ago
How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support. Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town. How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?
- DanielHB 1mo ago
  I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.
  - aashu_dwivedi 1mo ago
    > I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?
    - DanielHB 1mo ago
      I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin business. Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.
- rhdunn 1mo ago
  Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.
  - 1mo ago
osigurdson 1mo ago
A lot of companies seem to want to lock in to one solution or the other - like picking Oracle or SQL Server. The landscape is far too unsettled for that imo.
stuaxo 1mo ago
Misread as "infernal operations" which made it fun.
WhyComboNadir 1mo ago
This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily. Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.
- mv4 1mo ago
  Hermes is the way to go. Accounts provided by the frontier labs are just too volatile.
javier2 1mo ago
we have 7 coworkers we have been trying to re-instate for nearly 4 months now. All using the same google workspace sso, so there really was no special reason to ban them...

by cle 1mo ago

nullocator 1mo ago

But Philippines is on Anthropics list of allowed countries?

nullsanity 1mo ago
[dead]
wahnfrieden 1mo ago
It was flagged for account-sharing, or detecting a compromised account
- Grimburger 1mo ago
  How do you know there wasn't account sharing though? I've seen some amazingly dodgy stuff when hiring people from south east Asia, sharing a paid account with friends worth a months rent there seems milquetoast in comparison.
  - svachalek 1mo ago
    There clearly was account sharing, someone logged into the wife's account from the Phillipines.
    - weird-eye-issue 1mo ago
      You aren't supposed to add other users to your Team plan?
    - jurgenburgen 1mo ago
      The core complaint was that it took weeks for Anthropic support to restore access. For a startup that might as well be years.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - techpression 1mo ago
      Well a VA would need access to her account, just like how they would need email access etc. But Anthropic has clearly picked the enterprise side of things, small teams and startups without millions of dollars in token budgets are irrelevant to them. I’m surprised they even got their account back to be honest.
      - thaanpaa 1mo ago
        And yet enterprises will be the first to move to on-prem LLMs as soon as they become feasible. The next generation of TPU chips already promises 5x efficiency and enough RAM to run a 1TB+ model, and Kimi K3 is about as good as Fable for a lot of tasks, so we'll be there much sooner than anyone anticipated.
        techpression 1mo ago
        One can only hope, it would be great for everyone, myself included (the company I work for rather)
    - cle 1mo ago
      The VA had her own account on the Team plan.
  - coldtea 1mo ago
    >How do you know there wasn't account sharing though? Even if it was, it should be able to be sorted, maybe pay some overcharge or explain, and have your fucking business access re-instated.
    - anon373839 1mo ago
      This is such a tough problem. Anthropic would need access to some kind of technology that could, like, intelligently handle unforeseen circumstances and nuances. Yeah, that’s definitely not something we should expect of them.
      - antonvs 1mo ago
        It’s interesting how much Anthropic itself is a demonstration that its own hype is false.
        serial_dev 1mo ago
        Just use any product going all in on AI hype. In 5 minutes you will see annoying bugs, server is down, non-sensical press releases, confusing UI. This is GitHub, this is Cursor, this is Anthropic, this is Google, this is all of them.
        Forgeties79 1mo ago
        Not to mention if their tools were so clearly useful they wouldn’t spend so much time making UI updates designed to force, trick, or confuse me into using their tool when it wasn’t my intention. SaaS companies with assistant integrations are the worst about this (looking at you, HubSpot)
        coldtea 1mo ago
        Including most of vide coded apps one sees, even from people who they'd trust before. Anecdotal example, I downloaded a new alerting app recently from an indie dev who had a small following back in the day in iOS space. It asked for a subscription, like $20/year. I thought, let me try this the (final version, from Mac App Store) app first. Well, it's a barely-there vibecoded shit. There's a bare-bones list, everything looks like my nephew designed it, the macOS "app" is a iPhone-size view of the iOS one, it has a bug that if you click on it it opens multiple duplicates of the same list view for no reason that you have to manually close, and in general it barely works. Yay for vibe coding.
  - PunchyHamster 1mo ago
    why does that matter ? Why does that block entire corporate account not a given user ? Use your brain
- rhdunn 1mo ago
  I had my GMail account locked for 1-2 years because I accessed it from my parents house (in the same country but in a different county) while on holiday. That was because they detected the account being used from a different IP address. Using VPNs can also trip this.
  - willmadden 1mo ago
    Interesting, I only use VPNs and have never had an issue other than constant "prove that it is you" secondary authentication.

kbrannigan 1mo ago

How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support. Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town. How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?

DanielHB 1mo ago
I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.
- aashu_dwivedi 1mo ago
  > I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers. What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?
  - DanielHB 1mo ago
    I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin business. Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.
rhdunn 1mo ago
Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.
- 1mo ago

osigurdson 1mo ago

A lot of companies seem to want to lock in to one solution or the other - like picking Oracle or SQL Server. The landscape is far too unsettled for that imo.

stuaxo 1mo ago

Misread as "infernal operations" which made it fun.

WhyComboNadir 1mo ago

This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily. Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.

mv4 1mo ago
Hermes is the way to go. Accounts provided by the frontier labs are just too volatile.

javier2 1mo ago

we have 7 coworkers we have been trying to re-instate for nearly 4 months now. All using the same google workspace sso, so there really was no special reason to ban them...