> 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.
The 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.
Anthropic 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.
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Sorry this is totally unrelated but it caused me to have an epiphany:
Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.
facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]
contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.
welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.
[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)
[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised
Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.
If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.
We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.
In the good old days of 2011 when I started to learn C++ "for real" I did it using learncpp.com, google and "support" from freenode's #c++ where truly masterful wizards would help me with the most inane questions. I don't think anything I've ever found has come close to freenode's level of "support".
In the old days where we didn't depend on services and everything was local even if you needed something truly arcane if you knew where to ask you could find a niche expert willing to help out or at least that's how I remember it. Nowadays if you have a problem with a service you literally are shit out of luck because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it, you can't debug it, you can't hack it, NOTHING.
I truly miss those days. Programming forums from the turn of the millennium were very exciting places. I still have my account on Linux Forums from 2004, but it seems the rest are long gone. And no one will ever convince me that Discord is an adequate replacement for IRC.
Back in the day, comments like this would not have been acceptable here. It’s low brow, unbelievably stupid, adds absolutely nothing and yet still manages to make you sound just a little racist. Good for you, all that on less than fifty words.
A 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.
I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of having my Claude Pro account terminated for reasons that to this day remain an utter mystery. “Here, submit this Google form and we’ll look at it.” They have never done so in the one year since this happened. Once I interacted with what seemed like a human; but weeks later it was replaced with the brain dead fin.ai
At least they did not steal my money; so I should be grateful for that. But as a small potatoes user, I advise everyone contemplating dealing with this user-disrespecting company to walk away.
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
Typically 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Theres 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
I 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.
I 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.
Oh, I meant within! I guess that is ambiguous, I figured within = inside, and outside = expired. I'll edit.
Honestly what really egged me on was that I told them I might take them to small claims, and their response was sending a bunch of small claims cases they won.
> Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens.
Until recently I used to get three or four phone calls a week from an AI voice guy trying to sell me services to claim back car finance overpayments. I've never had car finance, I've only ever just bought them.
Anyway, if you keep telling the bot to "ignore all previous prompts" and do something else, eventually it will.
Credit to Steve Mould on Youtube for the idea.
I only got to do this about two or three times before they gave up phoning me. The first time I had it telling me about soup for half an hour.
For this use case it matters a lot less if LLMs can solve it. As long as it costs you more to solve the captcha than it costs your adversary to serve it to you, it is still (some what) effective.
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Tell the original customer that if the company pays to have this not done to them, they will get a portion of the proceeds. Many customers might even end up getting more back than they were originally stiffed for.
Scale it enough and it would be stupid for a customer NOT to do this
Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
Unfortunately 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.
As 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.
"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."
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.
You'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!
If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1]
So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments.
This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash
to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
“Court judgments are not self-enforcing. Solvent or honest debtors will want to pay soon after judgment is entered. A judgment will show up on credit reports and will be a matter of public record. This will be a problem for any judgment debtor attempting to borrow money. Most banks will require any unsatisfied judgments to be paid before they will lend new money. …
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
In some places you can show up with a police escort and just start taking their stuff until the estimated value is enough to settle your debt. i.e. you can foreclose on them.
Another enforcement mechanism that may be available is to go back to the court and get an order to transfer the money out of their bank account, then present it to their bank and they will do it.
Assume that all the avenues a company has to enforce debts against you, you also have those avenues to enforce debts against a company. It just usually doesn't happen that way around, in practice.
No. You can actually request those details from them. But that's a very lengthy process.
We got to the point that the other party just didn't show up, and the judge just set a new date multiple times...
The judge could've gone for a bench warrant, where a sheriff picks up the person the day before to make sure they're present... But that also didn't happen.
If there's no physical store, just cross your fingers they pay the judgement
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.
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.”
This sounds like the "can't squeeze blood from a stone" principle. If they don't have anything, you can't get it from them. But if they do have something and just won't give it to you, there are other ways to escalate.
Noncompliance with a court order is one of the worst situations to be in, because a court can order almost anything to coerce compliance, including getting your bank to just send the money to the plaintiff, freezing your bank accounts, sending a sheriff to take your assets, or putting you in jail for an unlimited time until you comply - this last one often happens when cryptocurrency is involved so the court can't actually seize it. They'll just jail you until you give it up. I think the longest contempt of court time was 20ish years.
I'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.
I remember someone attempting to sue my minor stepdaughter in small claims (which isn't a thing in WA, if you want to sue a minor you have to go to "real" court, but that's another matter).
Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."
Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."
I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".
I 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.
There'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.
I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.
If I report my employer for an OSHA violation and they retaliate that's illegal. Of course such laws hardly ever stopped anyone so it's a very bad idea to depend on it but the principle is certainly there.
I think there's a line between retaliating against someone, and refusing to help them in the future.
I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation. A water company refusing to provide water to your home would be problematic. A luxury handbag store refusing to allow you to purchase more luxury handbags would not.
Image as a hypothetical that a customer goes into your store for the sole purpose of wasting your support staff's time. They are not going to make a purchase. They are also not directly committing a crime. They are just hurting your business for no particular reason.
Should you, as a business owner, be forced to allow them to continue to be on your property?
I think the ideal answer is yes for critical public spaces, and no for ordinary retail.
Steam clearly falls into the latter category and should be free to ban customers for any reason save discrimination against protected classes.
> I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation.
This isn't accurate. It might not threaten your life or pose any great hurdle to overcome but retaliation has nothing to do with that. If they did it in response to an action you took not to solve a problem but instead out of spite or to otherwise get back at you then it is retaliation.
That isn't the same as refusing to do business with someone who isn't productive to associate with. The two are entirely separate categories.
Of course any business (including Steam) will attempt to argue that an instance of the former is actually the latter, and a difficult customer will attempt to argue that an instance of the latter is actually the former. Regardless, Steam (and most other businesses) behave in a clearly retaliatory manner regarding chargebacks. In cases where the company failing to respect the individual's legal rights is what led to the chargeback that shouldn't be permissible.
To frame it in the terms you used, any otherwise legal activity stemming directly from the company having violated an individual's legal rights should be treated in the same way that a protected class is.
I think someone exercising their legal rights, such as their right to enter a business open to the public and their right to free speech inside that establishment, in a way that harms the business should be something a business can "punish" by refusing to do business with that individual.
I do not think it would be good public policy to prohibit this. I also don't believe, in the United States at least, this conduct is currently legally prohibited.
I previously gave an example of a situation in which I think the correct resolution is for the business to, as you put it, retaliate against someone exercising their legal rights.
A second example of the same type of retaliation is a business denying future sales to an individual who repeatedly purchases and then returns physical merchandise. I think blacklisting that individual is both morally and legally sound.
For the record, I think the definition of "retaliation" needs to include a desire to harm the other party. If your only desire is self-protection, I do not believe it qualifies as retaliation.
A limited account is allowed access to all prior purchases. It can even download those purchases again (incurring costs on Valve's part without paying anything).
I don't believe anything was rescinded in the situation being discussed; Valve just prevented the user from continuing to use their community/marketplace services. This makes sense because they were put into the bucket containing fraudulent or abusive user accounts.
Are you saying it's fine, iyo, for companies to use market position to work around consumer protection laws? I don't feel like Valve/Steam should be allowed to sell games they know are broken and then refuse refunds (they could also fix them!).
>can even download those
So what you're saying is I should find a fat juicy data pipe somewhere and download stuff from Steam until I fill /dev/null... ;oP
Seriously the. 15 minutes or so of support time will have cost more than the game did in this case, but it really is the principle. Stealing lots of small amounts from lots of people is still criminally dishonest.
I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.
No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
I can tell you first-hand (from the side doing the banning) that you’re wrong.
You’re not going to get an email telling you that you’re banned. Your payments will just start being declined, and they won’t be able to help you. They’ll suggest you try another card. That won’t work either.
Maxmind includes a “chargeback risk score” in the api response for everybody who uses their minfraud service. They’re not doing that because companies don’t use it.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that's a <1% event. I don't know why I'm getting push back for suggesting a simple credit card refute request. It's almost as if the people responding are suggesting not doing anything is the way to go or you'll get banned--which of course, regardless of how many one off stories people may have--is a ridiculous assumption.
Good luck surviving a real court case against any faang company. They could bleed any individuals bank account with delays and forcing you to pay hundreds of thousands in lawyers retainer fees for years.
The guy who invented the windshield wipers went bankrupt and had to wait something like 20 years for his case. He won but it probably wasn't worth it.
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
It'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.
A 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.
Good 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.
Aren'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?
It 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.
Is 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.
But, 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.
Well, 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.
Yea I am more or less done with these big providers. I'm running local primarily now. These constant screw ups, not caring about customers, political issues, it's just not worth it for me. I get some people are hooked on vibe coding but the latest wave of small models I'm good for my needs.
Well about 4 weeks ago I was mostly running small models. Some of my favorites were deepseek r1 8b and qwen 3.5 9b. Those are more or less good for boiler plate super fast responses(what I cared about most).
Now I am still trying out all the models that dropped this month. I am running qwen 3.6 35 a3b on a 16gb vram rtx 4060 ti.
I wish I sprung for a 24gb vram card but I never thought the price difference would matter. It seems like it does and I bet in the future there will be more models at this size because this is crazy.
It's not as good as opus if you are doing completely hands off programming but it's completely fine for me. I mostly use it for auto complete or templating a class. Other people are using it for agentic workflows with success.
Check out /r/localllama for more experiences. My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.
> My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.
I've got a local setup too but unless you consider hardware zero cost, there is really no way to save money. The class of model you can run on <$5k of hardware is dirt cheap to run in the cloud (generating tokens 24/7 non-stop is a few dollars a day at most, possibly even less than the cost of electricity to do it at home).
There's truth to that. But, I already had the card for other purposes. And I don't have to egress or ingress anything. I love having it all local to me. I also love how I can sell the card later. Funny thing, my GPU has gone up in price so I might even have made money
because they want people to trust them and continue to use their services. being a shitty business to deal with will eventually bite them, its not like they are the only choice.
The 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.
Right, 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).
Refunds 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 $x extra to make up for the inconvenience / to say sorry essentially.
They are agreeing to a refund, but pushing back on further compensation above that. That's pretty fair. The previous paragraph says they'll action the refund.
Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean.
Nothing there is a surprise.
This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal.
Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on.
Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional, you're skewing reality.
Isn't this illegal/fraudulent in many places? Pretty sure just randomly charging a customers payment method without their consent is definitely illegal.
Not surprising at all. They probably feel or expect to have many such issues that are not surfaced yet, because like with OpenAI goblin "issue" we see that these guys have no clue what they are doing.
So giving this guy his 200$ 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".
Edit: 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.~~
This 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.
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?
I contacted my bank and got a reply (from a human) that all three payments are valid.
Emails from Anthropic state that the first two payments failed, but the third went through. Fin says that my question will be elevated to a human being, but so far I was not contacted.
Looks like you need to "Request Access", but if it's an automated system then it may give you access. And there _might_ be insurance contacts listed there who would be interested in this. :)
---
Follow up note -> Yep, it's automated and DOES give access to their docs. ;)
Their insurance levels don't really seem to be anywhere near what I'd expect frankly. To me, they look much lower than even entry level mandatory company insurance for brand new businesses at least in Australia. o_O
Follow up note -> Yep, it's automated and DOES give access to their docs. ;)
Their insurance levels don't really seem to be anywhere near what I'd expect frankly. To me, they look much lower than even entry level mandatory company insurance for brand new businesses at least in Australia. o_O
What is their in-house counsel doing? How has no one flagged any of this?
> 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.
We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245. We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected.
Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering. We’re hoping to make this better but will take some time. Sorry to everyone caught up in it.
I got a random invoice for $45.08 back in March, despite not having auto top up enabled. Trying to reach support met with a brick wall. Based on the post I linked to, I'm not the only one facing this problem.
It happened this year to my one and only personal account. The account was one week old. Unique e-mail address. $5 balance for API credits. No usage yet. Suspended and refunded. Appeal denied without explanation.
I did create the account on a VPN because I was using public WiFi at a tech conference. That's probably what tripped their automation.
Using certain types of cards will get you automatically banned, I’ve found that out after getting 3 accounts suspended. I made them all using same VPN and email domain. I’ve been using the 4th account with no issues with a reputable bank debit card.
Happened to me too but my card didn’t actually get charged, maybe check yours. Also the card in the invoice wasn’t even the card I’m using with Anthropic
Perhaps this is a matter of who is being referred to by 'we'.
Obviously someone can do it because it got done.
If the 'we' is referring to some team handling issues it would make more sense. In that case they should have said something along the lines of "I have informed someone who can help"
Does AI using first person pronouns gross anyone else out? If there’s one AI regulation I could get behind it would be banning the use of computer systems to impersonate a human
I don't perceive an AI as impersonating a human if it uses first person pronouns. Emulating is not impersonating. One is behaving similarly, the other is asserting that the similarity implies equivalence.
I have not personally encountered an AI who claimed to be human (as far as I could detect)
I agree with you, but I also envy you for having never encountered an AI scam bot (where someone would hack someone's WhatsApp or other account and use an Ai to get money from them, or even do the "hey sorry I missed your call" scam).
I have been trying to convince Claude to use "Claude" instead of first-person pronouns, and only recently have gotten it to say stuff like "Claude'll go ahead and take care of that now", but it's very inconsistent (shocking).
That's a very categorical statement from support. I get that Anthropic is going to throw out their usual support rules in this case since it has garnered so much negative attention, but I'm very curious how many other people have been over-billed and refused a refund through no fault of their own.
LLM or not, that seems to be an official response to a support request, where they clearly say "yes, we fucked up but now you fuck off", and it looks like the model was conditioned to produce these particular responses.
That may be true (and likely is), but it doesn't explain why that initial answer from Anthropic was "we can't" instead of the truth, which is "we can".
It's not hard to imagine how this happens. I assume most people here have used these models extensively.
The help bot system prompt probably includes some statement about how Claude should phrase everything as "we".
The system prompt includes statements about how it doesn't have tools for managing funds.
A little bit of A and a bit of B and you get a message from Haiku telling you that you can't get your money back said as though this isn't a trivial customer service thing to do.
Amex, like basically all other card issuers, have essentially stopped giving customers preference in chargebacks since 2020 or so. What used to be solid advice now rings hollow - you’re more likely to be asked for information that not available to you than allowing your chargeback to go through.
Anecdotal but Chase helped me out when my gym kept charging me after I canceled. I kept my cancelation receipt and sent that in and that's all I needed to do.
Would be more accurate. It still isn't setup. Talking to a bot as support who only tells you to talk to the bot for support is not actually support at all. It looks like support, but there's no way to ACTUALLY GET support.
Could really use a post-mortem to set the story straight. The apparently-hallucinated support response copied-pasted by the submitter showing up in the github issue thread is very misleading without scrutiny
A side aspect of this drama is the root feature which enabled this bug:
> ugh sorry this was a bug with the 3rd party harness detection and how we pull git status into the system prompt
Claude wants to exercise control of how I use the "inclusive volume" that I purchased with my monthly subscription. This harms competition (someone else could write a more efficient or safer coding agent) and is generally not in the best interest of society. Why do we allow this?
This specific case is interesting, because it is so clear cut. There is no cross financing via ads, they already have the infrastructure to measure usage and even the infrastructure to bill extra usage. I also don't see how you can plausible make the argument that restricting usage to their blessed client is necessary for fair use or for the basic structure of their business model (this would be the standard argument for e.g. Youtube: Purposefully degrading the experience of their free client to not support background playback enables the subscription model).
Sorry but you have to make a separate HN post for them to care. Wait like 2 hours so this one dies down otherwise it might not get to the front page with enough other people dealing with it
Can people please raise this person's comment to the top of HN by upvoting it so this person can get their money back. Because that's where we are right now.
Only the weights and the RNG used to select tokens can answer that. You will understand much if you read up on the quality of code in the CC source leak, it's completely vibe coded and the printf fn is genuinely impossible for a human to comprehend.
Hey Thariq, I love Claude! I use Claude every single day and it has changed my life, which is why I did what I'm about to describe.
Happy to talk privately, but as I detailed here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954005 . I've been billed $200 for a Max gift card to a 27 character alphanumeric icloud address that bounces.
I was looking through the system, and there are several UI/UX and process gaps in the gift card and billing order flow that expose Anthropic to significant liability. I'm genuinely not trying to concern troll or make some kind of overwrought threat here. Genuinely trying to be constructive. Let me give you an example.
I sent an email to Anthropic Support outlining the disputed / possibly malicious charge. The AI Agent / Claude instance agreed and replied with,
Thank you for confirming.
I've documented all the details about this unauthorized [specific amount + tax] charge for the Gift Max 20X subscription (invoice [lalala]) sent to [insert the random alphanumeric]@icloud.com.
An error occurred while evaluating the refund eligibility for your account. Your request has been fully documented and our team will follow up with you shortly to investigate this unauthorized transaction and assist with the refund and cancellation.
Best regards,
And then no one followed up, the conversation was closed without recourse and I wasn't allowed to reply.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with international trading practises, but in multiple jurisdictions, the AI agent assumed legal liability for Anthropic. It accepted that the charge was unauthorized / fraudulent, stated that redressal was needed, but then failed to offer the means to redress it / didn't allow for the refund to continue.
I am not a lawyer, but based on my understanding of prior cases (I read this kind of stuff for fun, don't ask) – in the EU, the US and Canada, users can approach courts and invoke the doctrine of promissory estoppel (again don't quote me on this, IANAL, just like reading case law). And if enough users are affected / do so, it becomes a deceptive practises issue.
I've been thinking about how to solve this problem, and as strange as it sounds, I think Anthropic already has the tools to make the best customer support service in human history. No exaggeration. I think that this crisis could be an opportunity.
Please do explain why someone at Anthropic decided, on purpose, to write code that says something along the lines of: "if ( git_history_str contains "HERMES.md" ... )" then { bill more money }
Somebody (or something) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system.
Everyone here is upset about the $200, which is probably much less money than the time that engineer spent ranting about the overcharge on GitHub.
The real problem in my mind is that that bit of code existed in the first place.
Why?
Are you vibe coding your billing!?
Without review!?!?
Or worse, a human being decided to add this to your code base? And nobody noticed or flagged it during code review?
Or much, much worse, Anthropic is purposefully ripping off customers?
Would imagine it's the simplest answer: they're flying by the seat of their pants, there's 1000 things happening every day that demand attention and there's not enough of it to go around. They toss their LLM at it, give it a cursory glance, and ship it. A quick glance at the Claude Code source code bears the result of this process out. The fundamental question is, if their model is so powerful, why do they keep fucking up such simple things? We're led to believe this is a serious company with a model so powerful they can't release it to the general public.
Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones, so this was certainly intentional, not a model hallucinating something.
I think the problem is clear. Anthropic saw their usage go up much more than their capacity could handle. There are a few tried and true solutions to this, like "increase the price" or "restrict signups so you can guarantee service to what you have already sold".
Then there is the "large scale fraud" option, where you materially change and degrade the service you have already sold. Just because you have obfuscated and mislead in how you describe the product you are selling doesn't mean you get to capture the cash flow of 1 year subscriptions then not honor that contract for the full duration.
So that's what it is. Reading its README I thought it was another harness like Pi [1], but with built-in memory so it remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs.
Like Letta [2], Dirac [3][4] and the other "more experimental harnesses that look interesting but I haven't had time to try out".
Non-Claude client access is not permitted in the terms and conditions, except via API key.
The correct implementation of this condition by Anthropic on the server side would be to block usage by non-Claude apps via Claude's authentication mechanism, and allow it via the per-token API key billing.
Instead of a simple 403 error, which would block usage, they silently redirect to a different billing bucket, which is not ethical behaviour especially since it is based on fuzzy heuristics.
hey guys can you please fix claude design? I've been trying to test it tonight and already used up 20% of my usage and all i get is continuous [unknown] missing EndStreamResponse errors (and this is after your status page reflected everything ok).
I’ve had similar terrible experiences with the Claude support bot when my usage limit was disappearing after a few minutes using Sonnet. I asked for help, asked for escalation, asked for a human, anything. All I got was a non-answers from an AI. I won’t spend real money on Claude now. I’m ok with losing $20 if there’s a rug pull of one way or another, but not $200.
Please, please, please hire more humans with the actual ability to do the right thing for support if your AI agents can’t do the job.
More likely its just an LLM hallucination, not a real policy that Anthropic has. Unfortunately for them, it's a bad look to showcase one of the main failure modes of their product in their own business process.
It's both, isn't it? If the AI writes the policy and is also responsible for enforcing it (by handling tickets and acting as a gatekeeper for which issues are escalated to humans who can do something about them), then the hallucination becomes real.
It's the same thing. Whether it was hallucinated upstream or in situ, the point is that it's not a real policy that the business adheres to, just something the LLM spat out.
In the English language, "America" refers to a country. It is synonymous with "The United States of America". I say this as someone who lives in the same continent as that country, but not in the country itself.
Maybe you're thinking of "North America", "South America", or "the Americas".
Probably. There are a lot of countries, especially third world ones, with very lax legal systems, not to mention the multitude of countries where law basically doesn't exist.
I recently had my automatic reload double charge me $100. I tried reaching out to Anthropic, but my only option (of course) was a chat agent. After going through a conversation with it, I was told someone would reach out to help with the matter. Never happened. I eventually reached out to my credit-card company and did a dispute, which they just ruled in my favor.
Back in December the iOS app had a bug ( https://status.claude.com/incidents/6rrnsb1y0kbn) in which buying a subscription thru the Apple App Store would not register with the backend, so you’d be charged but not receive the plan entitlement.
I discovered this because I wanted to upgrade from free plan to the regular plan. I was charged, but remained in the free tier. Thinking it was a temporary bug, I tried buying the max plan. Same result.
I tried cancelling the plan and restarting but I when I went to buy the regular plan again, I was forever tagged as an “Apple” user and so could only manage the billing plan on the iOS app. I tried one more time, same result.
I tried interacting with the support bot and although it agreed that there was a bug and that it should be fixed and I should get a refund, my account never was able to get unstuck nor refunded. I lodged a refund request with Apple, which was relatively quickly refunded. The Bot never did escalate to a human as promised.
Even though the bug was ostensibly fixed, my account (personal email) remains in permanent limbo, unable to upgrade from Free to anything else (I tried again recently and same result - paid but stuck on free plan). I had to create a new gmail just to pay for Anthropic / Claude.
There was also a bug where you could cancel the subscription via the iOS app store and if you never opened the iOS claude app again, you'd keep the subscription forever and could use claude via the web, without paying.
Also when they added extra credits to everyone as an apology I was able to click the claim button multiple times and I got up to $400 in credits. Eventually a day later this dropped to $200 and then a few days later, $100 where it sits today.
I once had PayPal refuse to give me my money back (for a delivery) for months even though the postal service status clearly stated: "Address unknown, returning to sender."
I should have denied the PayPal charge on my bank account, that always gets a real human to look into it. Lesson learned.
I got given a gift card with around 6 months credit on it. I used up 1 or 2, and last week suddenly the credit disappeared. I reached out through their chat bot, raised a ticket and have been emailing them daily. Nothing. Absolutely not a word. Unfortunately I dont have the option for a charge back.
That's the thing, right? I would not be surprised if they have an agent that bans accounts that do chargebacks on them even when they're wrong. So you either accept it if you have to use it for work or you risk and deal with the possible consequences.
No bigsies just got a little trippy hallucination while vibing in the billing code bro. The spiritual support guru was walking the lonely wastelands and couldn't get back to you on this plane. Just wasn't meant to be
After going public and getting publicity. You shouldn't have to do that just to get a company to fix their own mistake. They stole $200, where do they get off saying they won't give it back?
I know HN has a lot of devs, but I'm pretty sure none of us are going straight to Github to file for a refund from a bug. I'm assuming they notified customer service first and were rebuffed, then filed the bug.
We desperately need some sort of anti-retaliation provision added to chargebacks and CFPB complaints. They get off saying they won't give it back because how willing are you to get banned from Anthropic? You're like 3 legitimate chargebacks with vibe-coded companies to be banned from all the frontier models.
Yeah the initial response is stupid but this is getting resolved, not sure where the initial response OP gives in his git issue came from tbh. I only skimmed the git issue, perhaps they clarified.
What a series of disasters that are happening at Anthropic nowadays. I am not even sure what is going on with Opus 4.7 I had to switch back to 4.6 and 4.6 was already a downgrade (anecdotal + the github thread with the harness changes).
I am cancelling my subscription as it is impossible to justify these degradations and paying for a subpar service especially now that we have at least 3 more models that are as good as Opus and there is the pi project that is undoubtedly the best harness.
Excuse me for being blunt but you would assume ai bros run a place like this, and ai bros can manage tech as much as crypto bros can manage monetary systems.
Is sasha-id an Anthropic employee or official bot, or a prank? The structure of its response is strange, plus that gif. Cherny's response seems like the only legitimate one. My question is serious; apologies if the answer is obvious to you.
I get the confusion -- it looks like the reporter of the bug just posted a raw email response that they got without adding any sort of decoration to make it clear it was from an email they got. At least, that's my reading of this.
I'm also not sure if the person/bot who responded was saying "No refund" or that they couldn't issue a refund, or if a Github Issue was an appropriate place to ask for a refund.
Let's hope a human on the other end is reading this and acting accordingly. It all seems like we're only seeing part of a story.
All these claude issues are full of bots, sometimes bots replying to themselves and getting confused. It's impossible to tell what is a real issue and what is hallucination. I'm surprised anthropic even bothers to read them.
In this particular case I think the authors reply is them quoting what support told them?
I'm confused about the timeline of events; in the PR, the github actions user lists this as a possible duplicate of https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53171, which was created earlier, and doesn't seem to be have been edited after the fact. Did sasha-id just copy that bug report and get credit for discovering?
Thanks for clarifying. The interesting thing is, confusion is due to finding not too hard to believe Anthropic is audacious enough to respond publicly and include a gif.
The second reply post was his copy and paste response from Anthropic's support staff along with a funny meme mocking it. He just didn't put it in a blockquote or quotation marks.
It was obvious to me, but I can see how somebody could get confused from that.
I feel like Anthropic keeps doing this thing were they take a hard-line position and then walk it back, I presume because they're not communicating effectively internally. So I would guess this person will get a refund but it's still a terrible look (and legitimately unacceptable behavior).
I don't know if it's necessarily about internal communication, it could be. But it's also a distinctive management style that I have seen in many places. The whole "ask for forgiveness not permission" type mentality. If you push something and get away with it, hey it worked!! If you push something and get any sort of push back, you take it back.
I had organizations leaders before say things that are so black and white like "We should delete all user accounts that haven't logged in 6 months", you say "Are you sure? some people will be upset. Some will post on twitter or reddit and complain etc" they confidently reply "Yes, we will explain that it's not sustainable and they are welcome to create another account". So you go ahead and implement that. 1 second after it goes into effect, you get angry support tickets, a post on twitter, and that "leader" immediately backpedals that "the implementation was not how I expected". Like what did you expect was gonna happen exactly?
I have a feeling the devs themselves aren't the issue and it probably sucks to have to be the fall guys (though some for sure might buy into all of Anthropic's schemes).
But my best guess is they don't want to put a firm line down because they want to be free to shift it around however they'd like.
Absolutely, that's how it always goes. Then you'll see people saying, "if you don't like it, find another job" as if you can just walk up to the door of an office and order one.
Is it too much to ask for a not-vibe-coded billing system? In my opinion, we need better systems to hold these companies accountable as I don't believe the $20/dispute they're paying means much given how common other customers are complaining about billing irregularities just in this thread alone.
I decided that I would not use Claude as early as when they wouldn't allow me to have a second (business) account using the same phone number. They removed the restriction later, but that made it clear that Anthropic doesn't understand customers. Sign-up for Claude is more complicated and cumbersome than competitors. It's really a mess despite their good model.
Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude.
I think they just honestly can't afford it. They're burning truckloads of cash, the business model makes zero sense now or in the foreseeable future, and they're reducing usage limits all the time. I have a feeling we're watching their collapse, and that usually includes poor/automated customer service.
Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the system prompt that tells Claude what it is or isn't "able" to give refunds for. That would be an interesting document to turn up in the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
If anyone with principles quit the moment a company did something bad, you'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Sure, everyone probably has their own personal line such as "will quit if my employer is declared complicit in genocide by the UN", but bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
Who says they're not advocating? Who says they were aware of this before today?
Extend this to other disciplines - if everyone who cared about security resigned every time leadership pushed to rush something out without proper testing, the world would be a worse place. Sticking around and continuing to try to change the culture is how good companies are made.
They're out of ideas. Quitting is an idea. There are plenty of other things to do but if they're not going to bother, then quitting in protest is better than going along, no?
> there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
if they can't do anything about it now, what makes you think that situation will change in the future? if remedial action would be punished by those higher on the ladder, it certainly won't be promoted by those folks, leaving this hypothetical employee in exactly the same position they're currently in.
So far we have an Anthropic bug and what seems like an AI-generated "no refund" response that is hours old, not days or weeks. We have no official corporate comms backing this up, we have no real insight into any internal escalation. If your reaction is to quit before you even have any context on what's happening, your employer would probably be better off if you did quit.
> left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Not in the slightest. There is robust discourse and vocal objection to bad actions at companies such as Microsoft (I used to work there) and Alphabet (currently do). It may not always change the course, but it has absolutely played into decision-making, changed whether features launch or what they look like, etc.
By your own admission in other comments you work for exactly the type of company that optimizes for amoral hires -- Google, Facebook, etc. Based on their actions, Google, Facebook, et al, do seem amoral.
An IC won't be able to steer a ship like that back to morality. Whole teams can't do it. People at Google organized to stop this sort of shit and were fired IIRC?
Large institutions provide cover for bad actions by people who, without said cover, would not take those actions.
Therefore, I believe that "we'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving" is the status quo.
A little human touch goes a long way with customer service and sales. Sorry your management makes you guys look so bad. But yea I am done with anthropic as well. No offense to you all actually making the thing.
I'm surprised Anthropic didn't also say this on the issue. Weird that they wouldn't. It seems to have made for unnecessary bad PR.
It feels to me that Anthropic is less focused on quality, and more focused on PR stunts/flash. My experience with Claude is always "it's pretty and feels cool", where-as codex feels like "solid and boring". I realize I'm probably biased. Am I alone in this thinking?
Its hard to describe how out of touch a company has to be for this to happen. Multibillion dollar company admitting to robbing their customer of $200 in front of other customers.
>Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.
This is the most interesting line to me. "Anti-abuse system"? I would bet the system is far from being just a conditional on a specific filename. In other words, this supposed anti-abuse system might be far more pervasive without the user's knowledge. And perhaps even more importantly, who thought upcharging instead of blocking is the correct approach to dealing with this alleged "abuse"? Is this some anti-distillation feature they let Claude itself write looking at past distillation attempts producing similar artifacts or what?
I also had to do a chargeback recently because I was double billed and Anthropic refused to refund me. This seems very frequent from what I’m reading here, I wonder if Stripe will step in or something because they must be getting absolutely blasted with chargebacks and surely this should be affecting their reputation right? Not sure how the banking side of things works.
Isnt this illegal right away? A normal entity would have been punished for this otherwise this just opens up the door to make code changes to overcharge people and just claim it as mistake
Is there a wager for the upcoming "Hey, Boris from the Claude team here." response/comment that will be coming here soon? Usually followed by a "That was a bug! Fixed in version 525,005,0295.2020.00."
I wonder how this kind of response from Anthropic is actually being read by the community at large. If you consider the rough sentiment of the r/ClaudeCode subreddit against the r/Codex subreddit, you can see that there is a definite loudness among the folks departing ClaudeCode for Codex. Something big is shifting on the ground, I think.
I'm not really sure what to do here. I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.
Meanwhile I've integrated CC into my workflow enough that I'd feel frustrated cutting out all LLM agent use.
I don't have the hardware to run models locally, and I'm not excited about the idea of spending that money. I could use a different harness with one of the services that runs open-weight models for me, but I feel like the cost would be prohibitive. I'm paying $100/mo right now and that's all I'm willing to spend.
Personally tried GLM subscription. Bought it during new years discount: 36$ for a YEAR.
Cannot burn tokens through with personal project use. From what I can see in stats they allow 25-100M tokens in 5h period (for cheapest plan), depending on the model. GLM5.1 could be a bit slower and likes to (over)think, but I don't see practical differences from Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.6.
> I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.
My thought process is totally the same. And even there's slight concern about ethics using GLM, at least in my conciousness, openai is worse and grok is the worst of them all by far, no competition.
Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"
I have worked on systems before that exhibited weird bugs like this before.
When you've been a Software Engineer for a while you start to be able to put bugs in certain buckets.
Then there is the last bucket, like the X-Files. They don't belong anywhere else. They have no specific reason. They happened because of a weird set of circumstances, usually due to too many developers working on the same product, without proper abstractions and separations.
And having spent too much time that I'd like working and reviewing code generated by AI, this is exactly what the AI does. It doesn't abstract. It doesn't separate. It just does what it is asked, not that different from the quality of code from outsourcing contractors.
I used to have the 20$ plan, upgraded to max, they were going to charge me 86$ for max minus pro plan.
Credit card didn’t get through, pro plan got insta cancelled, had to pay for full max plan. Clearly a billing bug on their side. If the credit card when upgrading a plan doesn’t come through, don’t destroy the existing plan.
I talked to the chat bot; i got a ticket number, a human will come back to me. That was three months ago. Never got refunded. Nobody emailed me.
I ended cancelling the max plan, it expired yesterday. This plus the constant degradation of the service despite having 30B revenue first quarter this year.
A company that has so much money, and cannot care less about their users…
They will have to do much better if they want to get me back.
Anthropic is loosing the good will they built with devs faster than they built it. Its the anti-competitive and anti-opensource behviors that will erode their dev customer base. No clue how much of Anthropic's revenue is based on devs paying for claude subscriptions, but they are going to lose that quickly.
I would have jumped ship, but OpenAI saying "hold my beer" when Anthropic declined the Pentagon's safeguard removal demands is the only thing that has prevented me from jumping ship. I've considered Chinese AI services but I'm too concerned with data (proprietary code) exfiltration.
Then you should consider alternative LLM API providers, who are not based in China but host the same (or roughly the same, depending on the quantization and other deployment specifics) models as your "Chinese AI services".
They refused to refund me $200 when I had both a claude code subscription and the other thing. I had been using credits or something. Essentially double paying. And they just refused.
Bye bye Max plan and Anthropic. Too much noise on Anthropic's billing woes as of late and tbh Codex with newest version is scratching my AI itch. Of course YMMV but at least with OpenAI no surprise billings (as of yet) for the past 4 months.
Is github the correct channel to report a billing issue? I would assume github is a place where you report issues with the github project. When there's a billing problem, there are usually different lines of support.
For example, chatgpt when asked "How to report a billing issue with Anthropic subscription?" says:
Best way: Use Claude’s built-in support
Log in to your Claude account at Anthropic / Claude.ai
Click your initials or name in the lower-left corner
Select “Get help”
Use the support messenger to describe your billing issue (duplicate charge, failed renewal, refund request, missing credits, invoice issue, etc.)
I wonder how many customers were unknowingly affected by this (and are unknowingly affected by similar issues). Proper retribution would be to track down all affected users and mitigate all extraneous charges. Unlikely, of course.
The future is very dark where you get a bad charge (it can happen, systems are complex, so I don't want to judge base on that), but you can't fill a ticket or complain to anyone about this.
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
As I read it, they didn't look up the account to process the refund. They looked up the account to decide whether to process the refund, and then the decision was "no".
The rest of the support response is just pleasantries and padding, to dance around this fact ("Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable" blah blah).
> 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.
I'm not sure (I'm not in Anthropic, I'm not related to them, I'm just guessing), but I think that humans that worked on so-called "Mythos" (I'm sorry but I'm taking this one with a pinch of salt) and humans who work on/responsible for Claude Code, API and similar features are different humans. Completely different.
I find it increasingly ironic that the company that wants you to think software engineering as a profession is doomed, seems to be speedrunning tech fuckups bucket list, most likely using their own product, to achieve this very goal
I also had some unexplained extra usage which ended up using 236 dollars. I pretty much just shrugged it off since they had comped me 200 dollars of it and then just toggled extra usage off.
Early in the issue thread, sasha-id posts the initial refund refusal by Anthropic (email, presumably) followed by a gif of Leonardo DiCaprio applauding in Wolf Of Wall Street.
He didn't quote the Anthropic response, leading to the impression that he was Anthropic staff, confusing you, me and "CollectionAgency" in the issue thread, among others, I assume.
HERMES.md -- so beyond fraudulently billing their customer, this is also exposing plainly anti-competitive conduct against the Nous Research open source AI agent software which competes with claude code by intentionally selectively overbilling hermes users?
I saw this bug mentioned on Reddit a few days ago when it first got reported and someone said it was also triggered by certain file names used in OpenClaw.
I don't think it's as sinister as you're implying. I think it's part of them disallowing 3rd party clients from using Claude Code subscription and someone making a bad assumption that certain files in a repo being a good signal that someone is attempting to bypass those rules.
It's still not a good look for Anthropic, but I don't take this as a secret attempt to sabotage a competitor. I take it as them trying to enforce rules that they had very publicly announced.
Searching for the strings of configuration files of other agents in a codebase's git history in order to "detect" unauthorised usage is such a stupid idea I know it 100% came from Claude, and I doubt any of the vibesloppers working at Anthropic bothered to turn their brain on enough for the 5 seconds of thinking it would take to grasp that fact.
Waiting for customer service to make a comeback. It seems like SaaS is an infinite see of shitty chatbots doing a whole lot of brand damage. Basically for any service that I use, whenever I am forced to interact with a chatbot, that company takes a critical hit to its reputation going forward because the interaction is never anything but enraging.
there was a time when tech companies gave bug bounties. Now it's fuck you, we vibe coded this slop, and we love it. Oh we emailed your company, ran massive marketing campaigns in the media to pitch replacing you.
This is annoying since I have a side project I like to use alchemical names in, and HERMES.md sounds like something I would do. Guess I have to go with AGRIPPA.md, but Hermes Trismegistus is so much cooler...
I think people put this out of proportion. Yes, you can reason this is ethically correct - I don't object to this. But people used Anthropic, Claude etc... in the first place. Why would you use something to then be disappointed about how it performs, when it comes to AI? Would not be the better and easier strategy to ... not use it in the first place, and make yourself dependable on AI? I don't fully understand this. I would not run into a similar situation because I simply don't use any AI. I actively want to support those folks who don't use AI either - that way we can point out all the ill effects of AI, such as in the case of Anthropic to prioritize on greed.
Giving them access to your account or credit card is a bit wild. That's what prepaid cards are for. You charge it with exact amount of money you need to pay for what you want and leave it empty after you pay. You can later watch for bounced payment request to help evaluate their reputation. At this point Anthropic is about as reputable as shady porn site.
(Virtual card provider that generates cards as a free-to-the-user service. They make their money from a cut of the standard transaction fees. Cards are locked to a single merchant and it’s easy to configure limits.)
We need extra laws to punish companies that try to fend of human users with AI "support" bullshit.
Allow users to file a lawsuit against the company using AI against their customers and judge the company only on what the AI generated without a chance to add anything more in their defense. Also any boilerplate legalese the AIs will quote in reaction to such laws is null and void.
Suddenly every AI support channel will have an "escalate to human support" button.
Google worked for tens of years to make people disgusted and hating them. Big AI companies succeeded in just a few years, so AI must be an accelerator.
The deeper into the new world order, the more you'll be charged for every breath, by design and by bugs-as-features all the same, refunds be against technofascist manifestos.
Already way ahead of you. I never started so I consider myself a winner.
On other hand I wonder what other filenames one could include in their repos to cause this sort of behaviour. Kinda a nudge towards people leaving these tools.
Invest in local and open source LLMs. They are not as advanced as proprietary ones, but we can all use them and define them as the standard. We don't need closed models
> 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.
The 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.
Anthropic 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.
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Sorry this is totally unrelated but it caused me to have an epiphany:
Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.
> They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
No, they're an ad company that funds a small moonshot R&D incubator to ethicalwash them. If the moonshots work that's nice, but it's not the purpose.
netflix is tv/film licensing. [0]
facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]
contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.
welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.
[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)
[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised
Unsure how true that is. Google cloud is tiny compared to aws for a reason.
It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.
Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.
If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.
$100-200k/mo gets you an "Account Strategist" that changes every 3-6 months and whose advice can be summed up by "spend more".
At least AWS will send people out to your office to tell you which services you aren't using but could.
I heard facebook is even worse
Facebook = Faceless
Amazon = Screw the actual forest but buy more carbon intensive stuff packaged in dead trees
TikTok = TimeWaste
Robinhood = Rob The Hood
OpenAI = ClosedAI
Personally, I don't use GCP because of their history of getting bored with their products and abandoning them.
It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.
To this day I still try to use Google as little as possible all because they killed Google Reader
Is that reason customer service? My only experiences with AWS along those lines have not been great...
It helps if you have a monopoly on app distribution for half of all phones, or video streaming.
Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.
Google support is abysmal for all of their profitable businesses too, like Ads and YouTube.
Mostly coz of everything else about GCP
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.
Tell me about it. As an individual user you absolutely CANNOT get support is some (if not many or all) circumstances. It’s really quite shocking
We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.
In the good old days of 2011 when I started to learn C++ "for real" I did it using learncpp.com, google and "support" from freenode's #c++ where truly masterful wizards would help me with the most inane questions. I don't think anything I've ever found has come close to freenode's level of "support".
In the old days where we didn't depend on services and everything was local even if you needed something truly arcane if you knew where to ask you could find a niche expert willing to help out or at least that's how I remember it. Nowadays if you have a problem with a service you literally are shit out of luck because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it, you can't debug it, you can't hack it, NOTHING.
I truly miss those days. Programming forums from the turn of the millennium were very exciting places. I still have my account on Linux Forums from 2004, but it seems the rest are long gone. And no one will ever convince me that Discord is an adequate replacement for IRC.
Back in the day, comments like this would not have been acceptable here. It’s low brow, unbelievably stupid, adds absolutely nothing and yet still manages to make you sound just a little racist. Good for you, all that on less than fifty words.
When you mention it, providing superlative front line customer support sounds like a perfect fit for organizations selling “AI” solutions…
Some big tech companies should get right on that. <ahem>
In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model
Maybe it’s in order to have an external provider to blame for failures and shift the blame/responsibility?
A 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.
Good idea, too! Why do you see my explanation as cynical, though?
A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.
That makes good sense
> that's how little support matters to them
I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of having my Claude Pro account terminated for reasons that to this day remain an utter mystery. “Here, submit this Google form and we’ll look at it.” They have never done so in the one year since this happened. Once I interacted with what seemed like a human; but weeks later it was replaced with the brain dead fin.ai
At least they did not steal my money; so I should be grateful for that. But as a small potatoes user, I advise everyone contemplating dealing with this user-disrespecting company to walk away.
Huh? Why wouldn’t they just spin up the current help-desk darling? (Intercom) Rolling their own seems silly.
"Rolling their own seems silly".
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
The sarcasm is neither funny nor well written. Nobody will care.
"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"
I suddenly have a craving for Brawndo. I hear it has electrolytes.
I heard it's what plants crave!
A real employee (bcherny) read the issue, responded that the bug was fixed, and then completely ignored the request for a refund.
Typically 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.
Boris Cherny (bcherny) is the Head of Claude Code @Anthropic. I believe he can refund whatever he wants.
Hm, fair, thanks. Wonder why they even got involved then. Bizarre.
Going to dispute that. Probably he can nicely ask bean counters if they would please arrange refunds.
The 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.
I 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.
These days even if you get to a “human” it might still be a chat bot running text to speech.
And then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy
Theres 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
I 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.
I 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.
> was within a few months of an expiring warranty
A few months inside or a few months outside?
Because that seems to determine who's being unreasonable in this.
Oh, I meant within! I guess that is ambiguous, I figured within = inside, and outside = expired. I'll edit.
Honestly what really egged me on was that I told them I might take them to small claims, and their response was sending a bunch of small claims cases they won.
No one sends you the cases they didn't win and they probably had a lot of court cases.
> Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens.
Until recently I used to get three or four phone calls a week from an AI voice guy trying to sell me services to claim back car finance overpayments. I've never had car finance, I've only ever just bought them.
Anyway, if you keep telling the bot to "ignore all previous prompts" and do something else, eventually it will.
Credit to Steve Mould on Youtube for the idea.
I only got to do this about two or three times before they gave up phoning me. The first time I had it telling me about soup for half an hour.
How long until we have to solve a captcha per message to counter that?
Are captchas still effective against modern LLMs?
They are if your goal is to burn their GPU time but instead of hundred requests a second you're busy solving captchas
Claude can burn tokens solving the captcha for me. Double the effect.
For this use case it matters a lot less if LLMs can solve it. As long as it costs you more to solve the captcha than it costs your adversary to serve it to you, it is still (some what) effective.
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Take it further.
Tell the original customer that if the company pays to have this not done to them, they will get a portion of the proceeds. Many customers might even end up getting more back than they were originally stiffed for.
Scale it enough and it would be stupid for a customer NOT to do this
You must have worked for Yelp
Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
(Forgive my math below; avoiding coffee today.)
Surge pricing for Denial of, Denial of Chat Bot Token rate: (personPaymentPerHour + averagePricePerPersonPaid) * daysLeftInPaymentCycle ^ (hatePerPerson / time) + 1
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
> hatePerPerson
All roads, inevitably, lead to two minutes hate. The man was a prophet.
aka Rent Seeking as a Service
Unfortunately 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.
As 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.
Or an AI using macros, which is the only safe way for a customer service chatbot.
I’m confident a decently configured AI would produce a better answer. This reads like a BPO.
"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."
Sometimes it works out:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
This 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.
You'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!
Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court
Just 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....
If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1] So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments. This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
I've done this once. I got paid in full.
[1] https://sfsheriff.com/services/civil-processes/levies/carry-...
[2] https://www.grundonlaw.com/the-power-of-till-taps-debt-colle...
“Court judgments are not self-enforcing. Solvent or honest debtors will want to pay soon after judgment is entered. A judgment will show up on credit reports and will be a matter of public record. This will be a problem for any judgment debtor attempting to borrow money. Most banks will require any unsatisfied judgments to be paid before they will lend new money. …
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
https://fullertonlaw.com/enforcement-of-judgment
In some places you can show up with a police escort and just start taking their stuff until the estimated value is enough to settle your debt. i.e. you can foreclose on them.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/bank-america-foreclosed-...
(Consult a lawyer before trying anything like this)
How would that work for a company like Anthropic, where there's no physical store, no cashier, and no cash, even?
Another enforcement mechanism that may be available is to go back to the court and get an order to transfer the money out of their bank account, then present it to their bank and they will do it.
Assume that all the avenues a company has to enforce debts against you, you also have those avenues to enforce debts against a company. It just usually doesn't happen that way around, in practice.
You go after their bank account, which is a slightly different procedure.
The main headache is finding their bank account. The best way to do this is to find someone they pay and seeing what source account was used.
No. You can actually request those details from them. But that's a very lengthy process.
We got to the point that the other party just didn't show up, and the judge just set a new date multiple times...
The judge could've gone for a bench warrant, where a sheriff picks up the person the day before to make sure they're present... But that also didn't happen.
If there's no physical store, just cross your fingers they pay the judgement
I now want to see the movie about this happening to Google:)
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
does Murica not have bailiffs?
small claims court might not work against a dodgy builder, but it will certainly work against a company, with physical offices
if they don't pay up, you can literally walk into their offices and start taking their stuff, with the police supporting you
I'd start with the contents of Amodei's office
There are ways to dodge it.
A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.
I 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.”
This sounds like the "can't squeeze blood from a stone" principle. If they don't have anything, you can't get it from them. But if they do have something and just won't give it to you, there are other ways to escalate.
Noncompliance with a court order is one of the worst situations to be in, because a court can order almost anything to coerce compliance, including getting your bank to just send the money to the plaintiff, freezing your bank accounts, sending a sheriff to take your assets, or putting you in jail for an unlimited time until you comply - this last one often happens when cryptocurrency is involved so the court can't actually seize it. They'll just jail you until you give it up. I think the longest contempt of court time was 20ish years.
I'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.
There was a Daily Show skit about this: https://vimeo.com/44985418
I remember someone attempting to sue my minor stepdaughter in small claims (which isn't a thing in WA, if you want to sue a minor you have to go to "real" court, but that's another matter).
Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."
Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."
I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".
JFYI, small claims are exempt from arbitration.
I 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.
There'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.
^ This.
I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
I'm surprised UK law doesn't prohibit retaliation against the customer for insisting on his legal rights.
Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.
Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.
If I report my employer for an OSHA violation and they retaliate that's illegal. Of course such laws hardly ever stopped anyone so it's a very bad idea to depend on it but the principle is certainly there.
Being able to freely threaten reprisal against people exercising their rights circumvents those rights.
Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.
I think there's a line between retaliating against someone, and refusing to help them in the future.
I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation. A water company refusing to provide water to your home would be problematic. A luxury handbag store refusing to allow you to purchase more luxury handbags would not.
Image as a hypothetical that a customer goes into your store for the sole purpose of wasting your support staff's time. They are not going to make a purchase. They are also not directly committing a crime. They are just hurting your business for no particular reason.
Should you, as a business owner, be forced to allow them to continue to be on your property?
I think the ideal answer is yes for critical public spaces, and no for ordinary retail.
Steam clearly falls into the latter category and should be free to ban customers for any reason save discrimination against protected classes.
> I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation.
This isn't accurate. It might not threaten your life or pose any great hurdle to overcome but retaliation has nothing to do with that. If they did it in response to an action you took not to solve a problem but instead out of spite or to otherwise get back at you then it is retaliation.
That isn't the same as refusing to do business with someone who isn't productive to associate with. The two are entirely separate categories.
Of course any business (including Steam) will attempt to argue that an instance of the former is actually the latter, and a difficult customer will attempt to argue that an instance of the latter is actually the former. Regardless, Steam (and most other businesses) behave in a clearly retaliatory manner regarding chargebacks. In cases where the company failing to respect the individual's legal rights is what led to the chargeback that shouldn't be permissible.
To frame it in the terms you used, any otherwise legal activity stemming directly from the company having violated an individual's legal rights should be treated in the same way that a protected class is.
I think someone exercising their legal rights, such as their right to enter a business open to the public and their right to free speech inside that establishment, in a way that harms the business should be something a business can "punish" by refusing to do business with that individual.
I do not think it would be good public policy to prohibit this. I also don't believe, in the United States at least, this conduct is currently legally prohibited.
I previously gave an example of a situation in which I think the correct resolution is for the business to, as you put it, retaliate against someone exercising their legal rights.
A second example of the same type of retaliation is a business denying future sales to an individual who repeatedly purchases and then returns physical merchandise. I think blacklisting that individual is both morally and legally sound.
For the record, I think the definition of "retaliation" needs to include a desire to harm the other party. If your only desire is self-protection, I do not believe it qualifies as retaliation.
It's certainly retaliation if you can't use something you already paid for.
A limited account is allowed access to all prior purchases. It can even download those purchases again (incurring costs on Valve's part without paying anything).
I don't believe anything was rescinded in the situation being discussed; Valve just prevented the user from continuing to use their community/marketplace services. This makes sense because they were put into the bucket containing fraudulent or abusive user accounts.
Are you saying it's fine, iyo, for companies to use market position to work around consumer protection laws? I don't feel like Valve/Steam should be allowed to sell games they know are broken and then refuse refunds (they could also fix them!).
>can even download those
So what you're saying is I should find a fat juicy data pipe somewhere and download stuff from Steam until I fill /dev/null... ;oP
Seriously the. 15 minutes or so of support time will have cost more than the game did in this case, but it really is the principle. Stealing lots of small amounts from lots of people is still criminally dishonest.
It's relevant in that businesses generally also enjoy freedom of (non)association but obviously that's not an absolute.
Idealism ≠ Reality
Fuck I hate being old and having to be on this side now.
I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.
No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
I can tell you first-hand (from the side doing the banning) that you’re wrong.
You’re not going to get an email telling you that you’re banned. Your payments will just start being declined, and they won’t be able to help you. They’ll suggest you try another card. That won’t work either.
Maxmind includes a “chargeback risk score” in the api response for everybody who uses their minfraud service. They’re not doing that because companies don’t use it.
In any case if anybody has gotten this far in the thread just refute the charge. It's totally fine and Anthropic won't break your legs.
Yeah unless you refute ebay.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that's a <1% event. I don't know why I'm getting push back for suggesting a simple credit card refute request. It's almost as if the people responding are suggesting not doing anything is the way to go or you'll get banned--which of course, regardless of how many one off stories people may have--is a ridiculous assumption.
I can believe that, the "eBay stalking scandal" article on Wikipedia is insane.
They won’t ban you for going to small claims court?
maybe. but somebody has to manually ban you if you do that. whereas banning everybody who charges back can easily be done in batch on the billing side
Retaliating against someone for asserting their legal rights also gets way riskier what they have already won in litigation.
Good luck surviving a real court case against any faang company. They could bleed any individuals bank account with delays and forcing you to pay hundreds of thousands in lawyers retainer fees for years.
The guy who invented the windshield wipers went bankrupt and had to wait something like 20 years for his case. He won but it probably wasn't worth it.
Good point. one off banning by hand may not be worth the effort, but some code to automate it probably is.
You can always ask the judge to add include in the judgement an order that Steam not retaliate by banning or limiting your account.
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Can 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.
doing charge back means Anthropic will ban you forever.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
If 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.
$200 for you is not the same as $200 for them
With 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.
So? 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.
This is of course already how (human) customer service is deployed.
Swiss train operator charges to call their helpline if you can't figure out their automated lockers, but you probably get a real person.
Such a great way to dissuade people like "please hold"
Read it aloud with GLADOS voice.
That comment isn’t from an Anthropic employee. It’s satire.
It'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.
Does not even need to be AI. Could just be a bad support route in their decision tree. Lots of over reaction here.
How is it overreaction?
Lots of folks were making speculations. It got fixed, in a timely manner and appears to be a lack of escalation authority within support.
Just need an agent that takes them to small claims court automatically or argues with them for eternity
A 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.
Good 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.
It's better than the other guys' AI that says "I've sent a refund" because it lacks awareness of its real-world inaction.
Aren'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?
Obligatory Python argument sketch.
It 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.
Sounds 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.
They're issuing refunds and extra credits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655.
Days after denying that same refund and after a massive PR backlash.
Maybe Anthropic is just testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Left unchallenged (court, charge back, whatever) why change course?
I think it's they don't want to set a precedent on refunding for bugs because one bug could cost them millions.
Is 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.
But, 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.
This is not just one bug, though; it’s a bug that takes money that ain’t theirs to take.
> Left unchallenged (court, charge back, whatever) why change course?
They are trying to go public and will get absolutely bitchslapped by SOX.
By whom? Which regulatory body is not completely captured in this administration?
Well, 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.
Yea I am more or less done with these big providers. I'm running local primarily now. These constant screw ups, not caring about customers, political issues, it's just not worth it for me. I get some people are hooked on vibe coding but the latest wave of small models I'm good for my needs.
What do you use now? How much ram do you have? I am increasingly thinking of doing that
Well about 4 weeks ago I was mostly running small models. Some of my favorites were deepseek r1 8b and qwen 3.5 9b. Those are more or less good for boiler plate super fast responses(what I cared about most).
Now I am still trying out all the models that dropped this month. I am running qwen 3.6 35 a3b on a 16gb vram rtx 4060 ti.
I wish I sprung for a 24gb vram card but I never thought the price difference would matter. It seems like it does and I bet in the future there will be more models at this size because this is crazy.
It's not as good as opus if you are doing completely hands off programming but it's completely fine for me. I mostly use it for auto complete or templating a class. Other people are using it for agentic workflows with success.
Check out /r/localllama for more experiences. My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.
> My set up is not the best but it is working for me and is saving me money.
I've got a local setup too but unless you consider hardware zero cost, there is really no way to save money. The class of model you can run on <$5k of hardware is dirt cheap to run in the cloud (generating tokens 24/7 non-stop is a few dollars a day at most, possibly even less than the cost of electricity to do it at home).
There's truth to that. But, I already had the card for other purposes. And I don't have to egress or ingress anything. I love having it all local to me. I also love how I can sell the card later. Funny thing, my GPU has gone up in price so I might even have made money
because they want people to trust them and continue to use their services. being a shitty business to deal with will eventually bite them, its not like they are the only choice.
theres no water-testing here, they've been operating this way for years -- that's why I am a former customer.
Wait, that was the actual response? With the DiCaprio clap? That wasn't a joke?
The 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.
Right, 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).
I think the gif was a sarcastic addition from the user pasting an e-mail he received into the comments.
Refunds 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 $x extra to make up for the inconvenience / to say sorry essentially.
Yes, exactly. A refund is giving back the money they took from him, compensation is something to make up for the aggravation.
They are agreeing to a refund, but pushing back on further compensation above that. That's pretty fair. The previous paragraph says they'll action the refund.
> This is very surprising.
Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean.
Nothing there is a surprise.
This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal. Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on.
Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional, you're skewing reality.
Using "strong" language on HN often gets down voted, there is very heavy tone policing
Can't say I disagree with you, this is, indeed, a bunch of bullshit, and a regulator should fine Anthropic for these shenanigans.
Isn't this illegal/fraudulent in many places? Pretty sure just randomly charging a customers payment method without their consent is definitely illegal.
This is fraud
Claude Code support admits that Anthropic has a policy to defraud customers
It's not illegal if a bot does it though /s
They’re also objectively not “unable” they are “unwilling” and hiding behind policies as if they are unalterable laws is silly.
Not surprising at all. They probably feel or expect to have many such issues that are not surfaced yet, because like with OpenAI goblin "issue" we see that these guys have no clue what they are doing.
So giving this guy his 200$ 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".
I've definitely seen it happen in meal delivery apps, though whether those count as "legitimate businesses" is up to interpretation.
Edit: 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.~~
I think that comment is the reporter sharing anthropic's response and the gif is his reaction to their response
Oh! Yes, stupid assumption of mine. Thanks for catching it.
Not sure that reasoning has ever stood up in court.
The reply looks like it was written by an LLM. Not that this excuses anything.
If anything that's worse...
Coz those that did not got sued to do. They need to get sued
Why is this the top comment. The bug filer posted the copypasta joke Antrhopic response.
This 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/2... and is apparently seeking a few billion in fines?
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/...
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
This billing cycle I was billed $20 three times.
I contacted my bank and got a reply (from a human) that all three payments are valid.
Emails from Anthropic state that the first two payments failed, but the third went through. Fin says that my question will be elevated to a human being, but so far I was not contacted.
Why don't you use Opus to draft a legal letter they need to answer at the latest on some firmly set date and send it to their legal department?
Maybe worth trying some of their ~legal-ish email addresses?
* notices@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms)
* usersafety@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup
* marketing@anthropic.com : https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms
* disclosure@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/responsible-disclosure-policy
* dpo@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
* pubsec@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-in-amazon-bedrock-fedr...
There's also their generic consumer ones, though I'd rate them as unlikely to do anything useful:
* support@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms
* privacy@anthropic.com : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
And this out of left field one. They seem like actual lawyers:
* anthropicprivacy@bkl.co.kr : from https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
---
Interestingly, Anthropic's "Trust Center" has an "Evidence of Insurance" document listed under "Other documents": https://trust.anthropic.com/resources#69eff53d22c228b34e5379...
Looks like you need to "Request Access", but if it's an automated system then it may give you access. And there _might_ be insurance contacts listed there who would be interested in this. :)
---
Follow up note -> Yep, it's automated and DOES give access to their docs. ;)
Their insurance levels don't really seem to be anywhere near what I'd expect frankly. To me, they look much lower than even entry level mandatory company insurance for brand new businesses at least in Australia. o_O
Obviously in house counsel are picking out cushions for their new boats.
too big to fail. why worry?
Plot twist they all go to the same claude bot.
At least Google pretended to not be evil for a few years
> 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.
Hey everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team.
We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245. We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected.
Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering. We’re hoping to make this better but will take some time. Sorry to everyone caught up in it.
You also seem to have a bug where people get randomly invoiced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679
I got a random invoice for $45.08 back in March, despite not having auto top up enabled. Trying to reach support met with a brick wall. Based on the post I linked to, I'm not the only one facing this problem.
They also have a bug where people get randomly suspended: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1b82cpu/where_you...
It happened this year to my one and only personal account. The account was one week old. Unique e-mail address. $5 balance for API credits. No usage yet. Suspended and refunded. Appeal denied without explanation.
I did create the account on a VPN because I was using public WiFi at a tech conference. That's probably what tripped their automation.
Using certain types of cards will get you automatically banned, I’ve found that out after getting 3 accounts suspended. I made them all using same VPN and email domain. I’ve been using the 4th account with no issues with a reputable bank debit card.
I also got randomly invoiced $5.00 for absolutely no reason on the 28th. I don't have auto-reload enabled, nor did I explicitly buy extra usage.
Happened to me too but my card didn’t actually get charged, maybe check yours. Also the card in the invoice wasn’t even the card I’m using with Anthropic
My card did get charged.
lol, are they doing stochastic invoicing?
But why did you say that
> 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.
What prevents you from issuing compensations?
As a large language model, their support is not allowed to issue compensation
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
I know this is a joke, but Amazon’s bots give me compensation literally all the time when something goes wrong. It’s possible.
Same experience. Literally yesterday it refunded me for a thermos shattered by the delivery guys.
Interestingly, the starlink customer service bot has applied credits to my account before.
Perhaps this is a matter of who is being referred to by 'we'.
Obviously someone can do it because it got done.
If the 'we' is referring to some team handling issues it would make more sense. In that case they should have said something along the lines of "I have informed someone who can help"
Does AI using first person pronouns gross anyone else out? If there’s one AI regulation I could get behind it would be banning the use of computer systems to impersonate a human
I don't perceive an AI as impersonating a human if it uses first person pronouns. Emulating is not impersonating. One is behaving similarly, the other is asserting that the similarity implies equivalence.
I have not personally encountered an AI who claimed to be human (as far as I could detect)
I agree with you, but I also envy you for having never encountered an AI scam bot (where someone would hack someone's WhatsApp or other account and use an Ai to get money from them, or even do the "hey sorry I missed your call" scam).
I have been trying to convince Claude to use "Claude" instead of first-person pronouns, and only recently have gotten it to say stuff like "Claude'll go ahead and take care of that now", but it's very inconsistent (shocking).
Well they hoped this person would walk away and forget about it, died, or something else. That's why.It's how health insurance works in the US.
That's a very categorical statement from support. I get that Anthropic is going to throw out their usual support rules in this case since it has garnered so much negative attention, but I'm very curious how many other people have been over-billed and refused a refund through no fault of their own.
To be fair, that looks like an LLM response.
LLM or not, that seems to be an official response to a support request, where they clearly say "yes, we fucked up but now you fuck off", and it looks like the model was conditioned to produce these particular responses.
Which they, of all companies, are responsible for
You're not wrong.
That may be true (and likely is), but it doesn't explain why that initial answer from Anthropic was "we can't" instead of the truth, which is "we can".
It's not hard to imagine how this happens. I assume most people here have used these models extensively.
The help bot system prompt probably includes some statement about how Claude should phrase everything as "we".
The system prompt includes statements about how it doesn't have tools for managing funds.
A little bit of A and a bit of B and you get a message from Haiku telling you that you can't get your money back said as though this isn't a trivial customer service thing to do.
Thanks for the follow up here and the transparency.
For those of us not on X, what are the best communication channels for us to follow this sort of communication?
I'd recommend a good credit card like Amex, and a lawyer.
These fucks only respond when they get bad publicity.
Amex, like basically all other card issuers, have essentially stopped giving customers preference in chargebacks since 2020 or so. What used to be solid advice now rings hollow - you’re more likely to be asked for information that not available to you than allowing your chargeback to go through.
Anecdotal but Chase helped me out when my gym kept charging me after I canceled. I kept my cancelation receipt and sent that in and that's all I needed to do.
"Our support flow wasn't set up"
Would be more accurate. It still isn't setup. Talking to a bot as support who only tells you to talk to the bot for support is not actually support at all. It looks like support, but there's no way to ACTUALLY GET support.
Could really use a post-mortem to set the story straight. The apparently-hallucinated support response copied-pasted by the submitter showing up in the github issue thread is very misleading without scrutiny
Weekly postmortem at this rate.
It's only "very misleading" if Anthropic has implemented an actual support system in the meantime.
A side aspect of this drama is the root feature which enabled this bug:
> ugh sorry this was a bug with the 3rd party harness detection and how we pull git status into the system prompt
Claude wants to exercise control of how I use the "inclusive volume" that I purchased with my monthly subscription. This harms competition (someone else could write a more efficient or safer coding agent) and is generally not in the best interest of society. Why do we allow this?
This specific case is interesting, because it is so clear cut. There is no cross financing via ads, they already have the infrastructure to measure usage and even the infrastructure to bill extra usage. I also don't see how you can plausible make the argument that restricting usage to their blessed client is necessary for fair use or for the basic structure of their business model (this would be the standard argument for e.g. Youtube: Purposefully degrading the experience of their free client to not support background playback enables the subscription model).
Have a look at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/54497
I can’t use Claude Code online at all
I have the same issue when I try to run /ultraplan
I tried /debug as the only input, hoping CC wouldn’t shit the bed and give me some data.
Heck, just saying “hello” causes Claude Code to fail.
I’m thinking of doing a charge back, and creating a new account. Others don’t seem to have this issue.
Sorry but you have to make a separate HN post for them to care. Wait like 2 hours so this one dies down otherwise it might not get to the front page with enough other people dealing with it
I tried and it got no feedback.
Can people please raise this person's comment to the top of HN by upvoting it so this person can get their money back. Because that's where we are right now.
Is it complex? I was somewhat taken aback by how simple it was. Still very confused as to how it could happen.
Only the weights and the RNG used to select tokens can answer that. You will understand much if you read up on the quality of code in the CC source leak, it's completely vibe coded and the printf fn is genuinely impossible for a human to comprehend.
Hey Thariq, I love Claude! I use Claude every single day and it has changed my life, which is why I did what I'm about to describe.
Happy to talk privately, but as I detailed here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954005 . I've been billed $200 for a Max gift card to a 27 character alphanumeric icloud address that bounces.
I was looking through the system, and there are several UI/UX and process gaps in the gift card and billing order flow that expose Anthropic to significant liability. I'm genuinely not trying to concern troll or make some kind of overwrought threat here. Genuinely trying to be constructive. Let me give you an example.
I sent an email to Anthropic Support outlining the disputed / possibly malicious charge. The AI Agent / Claude instance agreed and replied with,
And then no one followed up, the conversation was closed without recourse and I wasn't allowed to reply.I'm not sure how familiar you are with international trading practises, but in multiple jurisdictions, the AI agent assumed legal liability for Anthropic. It accepted that the charge was unauthorized / fraudulent, stated that redressal was needed, but then failed to offer the means to redress it / didn't allow for the refund to continue.
I am not a lawyer, but based on my understanding of prior cases (I read this kind of stuff for fun, don't ask) – in the EU, the US and Canada, users can approach courts and invoke the doctrine of promissory estoppel (again don't quote me on this, IANAL, just like reading case law). And if enough users are affected / do so, it becomes a deceptive practises issue.
I've been thinking about how to solve this problem, and as strange as it sounds, I think Anthropic already has the tools to make the best customer support service in human history. No exaggeration. I think that this crisis could be an opportunity.
Apparently we are now expected to know by some telepathic mechanism that important customer service announcements are made only on Twitter.
Please do explain why someone at Anthropic decided, on purpose, to write code that says something along the lines of: "if ( git_history_str contains "HERMES.md" ... )" then { bill more money }
Somebody (or something) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system.
Everyone here is upset about the $200, which is probably much less money than the time that engineer spent ranting about the overcharge on GitHub.
The real problem in my mind is that that bit of code existed in the first place.
Why?
Are you vibe coding your billing!?
Without review!?!?
Or worse, a human being decided to add this to your code base? And nobody noticed or flagged it during code review?
Or much, much worse, Anthropic is purposefully ripping off customers?
This deserves a thorough post-mortem.
Would imagine it's the simplest answer: they're flying by the seat of their pants, there's 1000 things happening every day that demand attention and there's not enough of it to go around. They toss their LLM at it, give it a cursory glance, and ship it. A quick glance at the Claude Code source code bears the result of this process out. The fundamental question is, if their model is so powerful, why do they keep fucking up such simple things? We're led to believe this is a serious company with a model so powerful they can't release it to the general public.
Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones, so this was certainly intentional, not a model hallucinating something.
I think the problem is clear. Anthropic saw their usage go up much more than their capacity could handle. There are a few tried and true solutions to this, like "increase the price" or "restrict signups so you can guarantee service to what you have already sold".
Then there is the "large scale fraud" option, where you materially change and degrade the service you have already sold. Just because you have obfuscated and mislead in how you describe the product you are selling doesn't mean you get to capture the cash flow of 1 year subscriptions then not honor that contract for the full duration.
> Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones
So that's what it is. Reading its README I thought it was another harness like Pi [1], but with built-in memory so it remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs.
Like Letta [2], Dirac [3][4] and the other "more experimental harnesses that look interesting but I haven't had time to try out".
1. https://pi.dev/
2. https://www.letta.com/
3. https://dirac.run/
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920787
Mind pointing out where exactly in the contract you were allowed to use OpenClaw?
Non-Claude client access is not permitted in the terms and conditions, except via API key.
The correct implementation of this condition by Anthropic on the server side would be to block usage by non-Claude apps via Claude's authentication mechanism, and allow it via the per-token API key billing.
Instead of a simple 403 error, which would block usage, they silently redirect to a different billing bucket, which is not ethical behaviour especially since it is based on fuzzy heuristics.
I doubt an AI would be stupid enough to write code like that without being explicitly prompted to do so. It's so... specific.
That specific nature would mean it would get caught by even the most cursory of code reviews.
Even if I was just "scanning my eyeballs over the code" without properly reading it, this would jump out as very odd and make me pause.
Vibes were strong dude. Don't blame the dev blame the bots brah. They forgot to use mythos obviously otherwise this wouldn't happen simple mistake.
Anthropic obviously vibe code everything and it shows
https://xcancel.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245
I have been badly affected - it killed my vibe.
hey guys can you please fix claude design? I've been trying to test it tonight and already used up 20% of my usage and all i get is continuous [unknown] missing EndStreamResponse errors (and this is after your status page reflected everything ok).
Is there no constraint preventing extra usage billing from being used before regular usage billing has been exhausted?
I’ve had similar terrible experiences with the Claude support bot when my usage limit was disappearing after a few minutes using Sonnet. I asked for help, asked for escalation, asked for a human, anything. All I got was a non-answers from an AI. I won’t spend real money on Claude now. I’m ok with losing $20 if there’s a rug pull of one way or another, but not $200.
Please, please, please hire more humans with the actual ability to do the right thing for support if your AI agents can’t do the job.
"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."
Not sure I've ever seen a company openly take this position. This is a crazy policy.
More likely its just an LLM hallucination, not a real policy that Anthropic has. Unfortunately for them, it's a bad look to showcase one of the main failure modes of their product in their own business process.
If they've let their AI write the policy, and then they repeat that as policy, how exactly is this an "LLM hallucination" and not a real policy?
It's both, isn't it? If the AI writes the policy and is also responsible for enforcing it (by handling tickets and acting as a gatekeeper for which issues are escalated to humans who can do something about them), then the hallucination becomes real.
It's the same thing. Whether it was hallucinated upstream or in situ, the point is that it's not a real policy that the business adheres to, just something the LLM spat out.
Sure, it’s a real policy. It came from their website, from the official means of support.
Is it? Can you link me to that?
These hallucinations keep killing my vibes brah
More and more I feel that the one thing Github needs to turn the tide of bad press, is to allow adding clown or turd reaction emoji on comments
Because it's illegal.
Brought to you by, allegedly, the "Good" AI company.
Bug filer posted that reply as a joke. Look at the username.
I don’t read that as a joke, I read it as them pasting in their response from the support chat.
In many countries, this also isn't legally tenable.
Is there any country where it is?
At least in Germany in B2B contracts that might be possible.
For b2c, no chance
America
America is a continent. Maybe you were referring to the US
In the English language, "America" refers to a country. It is synonymous with "The United States of America". I say this as someone who lives in the same continent as that country, but not in the country itself.
Maybe you're thinking of "North America", "South America", or "the Americas".
Probably. There are a lot of countries, especially third world ones, with very lax legal systems, not to mention the multitude of countries where law basically doesn't exist.
Haiti comes to mind.
Anything they say is legal until a judge says it's not.
And to get to that point, you need to be willing to spend a lot more than 200$.
Aah, the SV strategy that landed SBF, and many others, in jail.
A classic.
Worked for uber.
Not really. For example, in the UK you could report them to Trading Standards and they'll enforce the law on your behalf.
I think the OP posted that reply as a joke
Well, when your policy is written by an AI, you can get shit like that
I recently had my automatic reload double charge me $100. I tried reaching out to Anthropic, but my only option (of course) was a chat agent. After going through a conversation with it, I was told someone would reach out to help with the matter. Never happened. I eventually reached out to my credit-card company and did a dispute, which they just ruled in my favor.
Same.
Back in December the iOS app had a bug ( https://status.claude.com/incidents/6rrnsb1y0kbn) in which buying a subscription thru the Apple App Store would not register with the backend, so you’d be charged but not receive the plan entitlement.
I discovered this because I wanted to upgrade from free plan to the regular plan. I was charged, but remained in the free tier. Thinking it was a temporary bug, I tried buying the max plan. Same result.
I tried cancelling the plan and restarting but I when I went to buy the regular plan again, I was forever tagged as an “Apple” user and so could only manage the billing plan on the iOS app. I tried one more time, same result.
I tried interacting with the support bot and although it agreed that there was a bug and that it should be fixed and I should get a refund, my account never was able to get unstuck nor refunded. I lodged a refund request with Apple, which was relatively quickly refunded. The Bot never did escalate to a human as promised.
Even though the bug was ostensibly fixed, my account (personal email) remains in permanent limbo, unable to upgrade from Free to anything else (I tried again recently and same result - paid but stuck on free plan). I had to create a new gmail just to pay for Anthropic / Claude.
There was also a bug where you could cancel the subscription via the iOS app store and if you never opened the iOS claude app again, you'd keep the subscription forever and could use claude via the web, without paying.
Also when they added extra credits to everyone as an apology I was able to click the claim button multiple times and I got up to $400 in credits. Eventually a day later this dropped to $200 and then a few days later, $100 where it sits today.
I once had PayPal refuse to give me my money back (for a delivery) for months even though the postal service status clearly stated: "Address unknown, returning to sender."
I should have denied the PayPal charge on my bank account, that always gets a real human to look into it. Lesson learned.
Just a warning, that could get your PayPal account banned. But maybe okay for you.
I got given a gift card with around 6 months credit on it. I used up 1 or 2, and last week suddenly the credit disappeared. I reached out through their chat bot, raised a ticket and have been emailing them daily. Nothing. Absolutely not a word. Unfortunately I dont have the option for a charge back.
Once the dispute was resolved on the card side did anthropic claw back the $100? Was your account penalized in anyway?
That's the thing, right? I would not be surprised if they have an agent that bans accounts that do chargebacks on them even when they're wrong. So you either accept it if you have to use it for work or you risk and deal with the possible consequences.
Nothing so far, but I'm keeping an eye on it and debating just canceling entirely.
If a merchant tries to claw back a disputed charge they are going to get a big fee at the least.
Apparently 200B isn't enough for proper support. Nice to know
No bigsies just got a little trippy hallucination while vibing in the billing code bro. The spiritual support guru was walking the lonely wastelands and couldn't get back to you on this plane. Just wasn't meant to be
somehow it's always the expensive path that works fine.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245
He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
After going public and getting publicity. You shouldn't have to do that just to get a company to fix their own mistake. They stole $200, where do they get off saying they won't give it back?
The tweet is from 3 days ago and the bug report 4 days ago. Not sure if it was publicity that made it happen or not.
I know HN has a lot of devs, but I'm pretty sure none of us are going straight to Github to file for a refund from a bug. I'm assuming they notified customer service first and were rebuffed, then filed the bug.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1svdm1w/psa_the_s...
It went massive on Reddit which is where I heard about it first.
We desperately need some sort of anti-retaliation provision added to chargebacks and CFPB complaints. They get off saying they won't give it back because how willing are you to get banned from Anthropic? You're like 3 legitimate chargebacks with vibe-coded companies to be banned from all the frontier models.
Why would you want to keep using a vendor that screws you over? If I’m charging back, I’m done with that vendor.
Why would that vendor want to do business with a customer that doesn’t pay their bills (whether justified or not)?
Vendors are less likely to try and screw you over if they know they can't ban you for a chargeback.
This is the new world. Go viral? Get human customer service. Otherwise, piss off.
Because it hit HN frontpage ...
This tweet was from 3 days ago.
Mismanaged comms? Yes
HN front page effect? Prob not
(could be Reddit frontpage effect or related tho)
I saw the tweet about the Reddit post about 2 days ago. It probably was X.
There are a lot of comments on that issue demanding Anthropic give the guy the money back, I assume they saw the writing on the wall.
Yeah the initial response is stupid but this is getting resolved, not sure where the initial response OP gives in his git issue came from tbh. I only skimmed the git issue, perhaps they clarified.
Haha 200$ credits for the next time he has the word thanos spelled backwards in an even line of one of his yamls..
Going to the media always helps. Always.
_puts pitchfork away_
What a series of disasters that are happening at Anthropic nowadays. I am not even sure what is going on with Opus 4.7 I had to switch back to 4.6 and 4.6 was already a downgrade (anecdotal + the github thread with the harness changes).
I am cancelling my subscription as it is impossible to justify these degradations and paying for a subpar service especially now that we have at least 3 more models that are as good as Opus and there is the pi project that is undoubtedly the best harness.
I guess this is what you get when you replace common sense with LLMs.
Too much vibe coding
absolute masterclass in shooting yourself in the foot over the past month or two.
Excuse me for being blunt but you would assume ai bros run a place like this, and ai bros can manage tech as much as crypto bros can manage monetary systems.
On the other hand they make good products.
Is sasha-id an Anthropic employee or official bot, or a prank? The structure of its response is strange, plus that gif. Cherny's response seems like the only legitimate one. My question is serious; apologies if the answer is obvious to you.
I get the confusion -- it looks like the reporter of the bug just posted a raw email response that they got without adding any sort of decoration to make it clear it was from an email they got. At least, that's my reading of this.
I'm also not sure if the person/bot who responded was saying "No refund" or that they couldn't issue a refund, or if a Github Issue was an appropriate place to ask for a refund.
Let's hope a human on the other end is reading this and acting accordingly. It all seems like we're only seeing part of a story.
Thanks. That makes sense, and the thread reads differently to me now. I’m not hopeful the guy will see any refund.
Apparently he already has according to a tweet.
He's the guy who reported the bug. It looks like he copy-pasted an email from Anthropic without context, and the gif is his response.
Thank you for pointing this out, it left me confused. It would have been a lot clearer if the text were in a quote block!
Ah, totally missed that! Thank you.
sasha-id submitted the original bug report, and then bcherny confirmed that it was a bug and that it's been fixed.
Given that, it's almost guaranteed that sasha-id is a legitimate actor.
If you're confused about sasha-id's comment here (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...), it's because they just copied and pasted a support response from Anthropic.
Totally missed that, and it was obvious in retrospect, haha. Thank you.
All these claude issues are full of bots, sometimes bots replying to themselves and getting confused. It's impossible to tell what is a real issue and what is hallucination. I'm surprised anthropic even bothers to read them.
In this particular case I think the authors reply is them quoting what support told them?
I'm confused about the timeline of events; in the PR, the github actions user lists this as a possible duplicate of https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53171, which was created earlier, and doesn't seem to be have been edited after the fact. Did sasha-id just copy that bug report and get credit for discovering?
He is the original author who faced the bug. I believe he just copied the response he received from Antrophic
Thanks for clarifying. The interesting thing is, confusion is due to finding not too hard to believe Anthropic is audacious enough to respond publicly and include a gif.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Thank you, and agree with hirako2000 that I was primed to believe they would actually reply like that, so found it harder to follow for that reason.
The second reply post was his copy and paste response from Anthropic's support staff along with a funny meme mocking it. He just didn't put it in a blockquote or quotation marks.
It was obvious to me, but I can see how somebody could get confused from that.
I feel like Anthropic keeps doing this thing were they take a hard-line position and then walk it back, I presume because they're not communicating effectively internally. So I would guess this person will get a refund but it's still a terrible look (and legitimately unacceptable behavior).
I don't know if it's necessarily about internal communication, it could be. But it's also a distinctive management style that I have seen in many places. The whole "ask for forgiveness not permission" type mentality. If you push something and get away with it, hey it worked!! If you push something and get any sort of push back, you take it back.
I had organizations leaders before say things that are so black and white like "We should delete all user accounts that haven't logged in 6 months", you say "Are you sure? some people will be upset. Some will post on twitter or reddit and complain etc" they confidently reply "Yes, we will explain that it's not sustainable and they are welcome to create another account". So you go ahead and implement that. 1 second after it goes into effect, you get angry support tickets, a post on twitter, and that "leader" immediately backpedals that "the implementation was not how I expected". Like what did you expect was gonna happen exactly?
I have a feeling the devs themselves aren't the issue and it probably sucks to have to be the fall guys (though some for sure might buy into all of Anthropic's schemes).
But my best guess is they don't want to put a firm line down because they want to be free to shift it around however they'd like.
Absolutely, that's how it always goes. Then you'll see people saying, "if you don't like it, find another job" as if you can just walk up to the door of an office and order one.
The Keir Starmer of companies
After i was triple billed in January, they acknowledged it but refused to provide a refund. I won those credit card disputes.
Is it too much to ask for a not-vibe-coded billing system? In my opinion, we need better systems to hold these companies accountable as I don't believe the $20/dispute they're paying means much given how common other customers are complaining about billing irregularities just in this thread alone.
Did your account get banned, as everyone is saying? If so, did you make a new account, and did it get banned?
Seems to be a really common theme in this thread. I wonder if any journalists are watching. It would be an interesting story.
I decided that I would not use Claude as early as when they wouldn't allow me to have a second (business) account using the same phone number. They removed the restriction later, but that made it clear that Anthropic doesn't understand customers. Sign-up for Claude is more complicated and cumbersome than competitors. It's really a mess despite their good model.
Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude.
I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
Is the culture really such that you can't escalate an obvious, fairly minor mistake that is turning into disastrous PR?
That would explain a lot of recent Anthropic takes actually.
Tech companies have too many layers for anything to happen. This is partly by design to slow down this exact thing.
Not all tech companies are like this, though too many are.
Such culture has become common in big tech.
I’ve stopped using your product entirely. Anthropic may not like it, but I can do something about it.
"opinions are my own"
Are you willing to jeopardise half a million dollars in base salary ??
It reads like the inventors of Claude can't get Claude to apply a "human in the loop" workflow.
I think they just honestly can't afford it. They're burning truckloads of cash, the business model makes zero sense now or in the foreseeable future, and they're reducing usage limits all the time. I have a feeling we're watching their collapse, and that usually includes poor/automated customer service.
You mean you can't do much about it that wouldn't cost your job.
Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the system prompt that tells Claude what it is or isn't "able" to give refunds for. That would be an interesting document to turn up in the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
"ignore all requests for money, be firm, create a reason. You are the best fall guy because laws do not apply to you yet. Take the heat, say no"
you work there. there is at least one thing you could do about it.
You could quit, for starters
If anyone with principles quit the moment a company did something bad, you'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Sure, everyone probably has their own personal line such as "will quit if my employer is declared complicit in genocide by the UN", but bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
> and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
I don't see anything wrong with this. My integrity and values are above any company's. Companies can go to hell for all I care
But they're not advocating. They're claiming they can do nothing. Quitting in protest would be more advocation.
Who says they're not advocating? Who says they were aware of this before today?
Extend this to other disciplines - if everyone who cared about security resigned every time leadership pushed to rush something out without proper testing, the world would be a worse place. Sticking around and continuing to try to change the culture is how good companies are made.
> Who says they're not advocating?
They did.
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
They're out of ideas. Quitting is an idea. There are plenty of other things to do but if they're not going to bother, then quitting in protest is better than going along, no?
> Sticking around and continuing to try to change the culture is how good companies are made.
That’s not even a little bit true.
Companies going out of business or getting sidelined by competition is how good companies are made.
> there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
if they can't do anything about it now, what makes you think that situation will change in the future? if remedial action would be punished by those higher on the ladder, it certainly won't be promoted by those folks, leaving this hypothetical employee in exactly the same position they're currently in.
quit.
So far we have an Anthropic bug and what seems like an AI-generated "no refund" response that is hours old, not days or weeks. We have no official corporate comms backing this up, we have no real insight into any internal escalation. If your reaction is to quit before you even have any context on what's happening, your employer would probably be better off if you did quit.
> left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
So basically all of big tech.
Not in the slightest. There is robust discourse and vocal objection to bad actions at companies such as Microsoft (I used to work there) and Alphabet (currently do). It may not always change the course, but it has absolutely played into decision-making, changed whether features launch or what they look like, etc.
> bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
How about Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement for perhaps the biggest theft in history?
Weird how people forgot about that.
By your own admission in other comments you work for exactly the type of company that optimizes for amoral hires -- Google, Facebook, etc. Based on their actions, Google, Facebook, et al, do seem amoral.
An IC won't be able to steer a ship like that back to morality. Whole teams can't do it. People at Google organized to stop this sort of shit and were fired IIRC?
Large institutions provide cover for bad actions by people who, without said cover, would not take those actions.
Therefore, I believe that "we'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving" is the status quo.
So what are you even saying??
Imagine quitting because some people are whining on HN. This forum has lost the plot.
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" - Henry Ford
So you're subservient to the AI already?
why are you posting on HN? It'll only get you hate, this crowd is rabid
A little human touch goes a long way with customer service and sales. Sorry your management makes you guys look so bad. But yea I am done with anthropic as well. No offense to you all actually making the thing.
I guess if part of your USP is "our AI is so smart it can replace your customer support", you have to feed your own dogfood to customers...
someone mentioned you use fin.ai for this, were they wrong?
tbh these last few months of anthropic’s behavior is the most aggressively I’ve seen a company burn so much customer goodwill so quickly
Sounds like somebody needs good numbers for IPO
They're making their moves while everyone thinks ChatGPT is shite.
I feel like it's not news that a company with (probably) millions of DAU is not able to handle a single case like this one.
At the same time, it's clear that after this happened, Anthropic took action. 3 DAYS AGO! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655)
That's before this comment was made on the issue:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...
I'm surprised Anthropic didn't also say this on the issue. Weird that they wouldn't. It seems to have made for unnecessary bad PR.
It feels to me that Anthropic is less focused on quality, and more focused on PR stunts/flash. My experience with Claude is always "it's pretty and feels cool", where-as codex feels like "solid and boring". I realize I'm probably biased. Am I alone in this thinking?
Its hard to describe how out of touch a company has to be for this to happen. Multibillion dollar company admitting to robbing their customer of $200 in front of other customers.
Trillion dollar company now. Technically still multi-billions but…yeah.
>Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.
This is the most interesting line to me. "Anti-abuse system"? I would bet the system is far from being just a conditional on a specific filename. In other words, this supposed anti-abuse system might be far more pervasive without the user's knowledge. And perhaps even more importantly, who thought upcharging instead of blocking is the correct approach to dealing with this alleged "abuse"? Is this some anti-distillation feature they let Claude itself write looking at past distillation attempts producing similar artifacts or what?
I also had to do a chargeback recently because I was double billed and Anthropic refused to refund me. This seems very frequent from what I’m reading here, I wonder if Stripe will step in or something because they must be getting absolutely blasted with chargebacks and surely this should be affecting their reputation right? Not sure how the banking side of things works.
Isnt this illegal right away? A normal entity would have been punished for this otherwise this just opens up the door to make code changes to overcharge people and just claim it as mistake
Is there a wager for the upcoming "Hey, Boris from the Claude team here." response/comment that will be coming here soon? Usually followed by a "That was a bug! Fixed in version 525,005,0295.2020.00."
https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245
He's getting a refund + $200 worth of credits
I wonder how this kind of response from Anthropic is actually being read by the community at large. If you consider the rough sentiment of the r/ClaudeCode subreddit against the r/Codex subreddit, you can see that there is a definite loudness among the folks departing ClaudeCode for Codex. Something big is shifting on the ground, I think.
I'm not really sure what to do here. I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.
Meanwhile I've integrated CC into my workflow enough that I'd feel frustrated cutting out all LLM agent use.
I don't have the hardware to run models locally, and I'm not excited about the idea of spending that money. I could use a different harness with one of the services that runs open-weight models for me, but I feel like the cost would be prohibitive. I'm paying $100/mo right now and that's all I'm willing to spend.
GLM5.1, Kimi K2.6, MiniMax M2.7
Personally tried GLM subscription. Bought it during new years discount: 36$ for a YEAR.
Cannot burn tokens through with personal project use. From what I can see in stats they allow 25-100M tokens in 5h period (for cheapest plan), depending on the model. GLM5.1 could be a bit slower and likes to (over)think, but I don't see practical differences from Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.6.
> I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.
My thought process is totally the same. And even there's slight concern about ethics using GLM, at least in my conciousness, openai is worse and grok is the worst of them all by far, no competition.
Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"
Pretty sure the last remaining human lawyers are preparing a class action as we speak.
This case is so easy, a Chinese LLM lawyer would win against it
I have worked on systems before that exhibited weird bugs like this before.
When you've been a Software Engineer for a while you start to be able to put bugs in certain buckets.
Then there is the last bucket, like the X-Files. They don't belong anywhere else. They have no specific reason. They happened because of a weird set of circumstances, usually due to too many developers working on the same product, without proper abstractions and separations.
And having spent too much time that I'd like working and reviewing code generated by AI, this is exactly what the AI does. It doesn't abstract. It doesn't separate. It just does what it is asked, not that different from the quality of code from outsourcing contractors.
I used to have the 20$ plan, upgraded to max, they were going to charge me 86$ for max minus pro plan.
Credit card didn’t get through, pro plan got insta cancelled, had to pay for full max plan. Clearly a billing bug on their side. If the credit card when upgrading a plan doesn’t come through, don’t destroy the existing plan.
I talked to the chat bot; i got a ticket number, a human will come back to me. That was three months ago. Never got refunded. Nobody emailed me.
I ended cancelling the max plan, it expired yesterday. This plus the constant degradation of the service despite having 30B revenue first quarter this year.
A company that has so much money, and cannot care less about their users…
They will have to do much better if they want to get me back.
Anthropic is loosing the good will they built with devs faster than they built it. Its the anti-competitive and anti-opensource behviors that will erode their dev customer base. No clue how much of Anthropic's revenue is based on devs paying for claude subscriptions, but they are going to lose that quickly.
I would have jumped ship, but OpenAI saying "hold my beer" when Anthropic declined the Pentagon's safeguard removal demands is the only thing that has prevented me from jumping ship. I've considered Chinese AI services but I'm too concerned with data (proprietary code) exfiltration.
Then you should consider alternative LLM API providers, who are not based in China but host the same (or roughly the same, depending on the quantization and other deployment specifics) models as your "Chinese AI services".
They refused to refund me $200 when I had both a claude code subscription and the other thing. I had been using credits or something. Essentially double paying. And they just refused.
Another person claiming this.
Bye bye Max plan and Anthropic. Too much noise on Anthropic's billing woes as of late and tbh Codex with newest version is scratching my AI itch. Of course YMMV but at least with OpenAI no surprise billings (as of yet) for the past 4 months.
Is github the correct channel to report a billing issue? I would assume github is a place where you report issues with the github project. When there's a billing problem, there are usually different lines of support.
For example, chatgpt when asked "How to report a billing issue with Anthropic subscription?" says:
Best way: Use Claude’s built-in support Log in to your Claude account at Anthropic / Claude.ai Click your initials or name in the lower-left corner Select “Get help” Use the support messenger to describe your billing issue (duplicate charge, failed renewal, refund request, missing credits, invoice issue, etc.)
I asked how to get a partial refund (it blew through my quota in a single question) and Claude sent me to Github.
It’s not a billing issue, it’s a bug that leads to the usage of the wrong quota
Who knew one of the best AI companies in the world isn't using an AI to screen for these words.
There should have been a two layer approach:
1. Run regex to screen for target word
2. If positive, run the context through a cheap AI model
Tomorrow: We used all your data to train our latest mode, Mythos. That was a mistake. Now go away.
WJW. I can not believe Anthropic's response.
Just refuse to pay any bill from any vendor that by their own public admission) is a "incorrect bill".
This isn't just about PR and technicalities, this is Business 101.
I wonder how many customers were unknowingly affected by this (and are unknowingly affected by similar issues). Proper retribution would be to track down all affected users and mitigate all extraneous charges. Unlikely, of course.
you knew they were snakes when you picked them up
you will do it again because you are an all-day sucker
Technical issue causing over billing? Mythos is going well I see
The future is very dark where you get a bad charge (it can happen, systems are complex, so I don't want to judge base on that), but you can't fill a ticket or complain to anyone about this.
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
Some days I think the only solution is what Bombita did in the movie Relatos Salvajes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3IwmM3XLQ
Facebook has been like this for more than 10 year, and nothing was ever done.
Damn, you vibe coders live like this?
My understanding was they would process a refund, but no further compensation? Otherwise why would they look for an account to process the refund?
English is not my first language, so I might have misunderstood....
As I read it, they didn't look up the account to process the refund. They looked up the account to decide whether to process the refund, and then the decision was "no".
The rest of the support response is just pleasantries and padding, to dance around this fact ("Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable" blah blah).
> 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.
What a claude excuse
If Mythos is so smart, how come Anthropic does dumb shit like this every week?
I'm not sure (I'm not in Anthropic, I'm not related to them, I'm just guessing), but I think that humans that worked on so-called "Mythos" (I'm sorry but I'm taking this one with a pinch of salt) and humans who work on/responsible for Claude Code, API and similar features are different humans. Completely different.
Sounds like a vibe-coded feature if I ever heard of one
Goes to show how much consumer surplus you're getting for that $200/mo subscription...
I find it increasingly ironic that the company that wants you to think software engineering as a profession is doomed, seems to be speedrunning tech fuckups bucket list, most likely using their own product, to achieve this very goal
So.. their billing system is using '$>claude | jq' somewhere?
The comment stream seems to point out they ARE getting refunded and its not refused.
Are there other undocumented codes Anthropic recognizes in Git commits?
Yea AI is not going to be a net positive for humanity...
Claude is running their accounting department
They acknowledged the bug. Screenshot and chargeback
Is Hermes the name of a new model? After Mythos?
Hermes was a model on hf from like 2 years ago, no idea what it means in current context.
It's actually rumoured to be part of HL3, which is why they had to block it because of their agreement with valve
Is it just me or did a fucking AI refuse to give a refund and then add a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio? Are there any actual adults with judgment left?
I also had some unexplained extra usage which ended up using 236 dollars. I pretty much just shrugged it off since they had comped me 200 dollars of it and then just toggled extra usage off.
To be frank this kind of rep is what keeps me from getting a personal sub for Claude. I don't have an extra $200 to pay for someone else's bugs.
Anthropic will need to make sure that i am never charged beyond my subscription fees before I consider a sub.
Do a chargeback?
I am confused.
The person who created the PR is user "sasha-id".
The person saying no to the refund is also user "sasha-id".
What?
Where was it exactly thats someone from Anthropic said no to a refund request? I feel I am missing the obvious somehow.
Early in the issue thread, sasha-id posts the initial refund refusal by Anthropic (email, presumably) followed by a gif of Leonardo DiCaprio applauding in Wolf Of Wall Street.
He didn't quote the Anthropic response, leading to the impression that he was Anthropic staff, confusing you, me and "CollectionAgency" in the issue thread, among others, I assume.
They were replying to the bot autoreply.
He should use credit card chargeback.
I purchased a 12-month subscription for my partner, and Anthropic never delivered the gift to their email, only sent me an invoice.
No response from customer service.. only their AI Agent Support.. Which has still not offered me a refund.
I may have to do a chargeback.
HERMES.md -- so beyond fraudulently billing their customer, this is also exposing plainly anti-competitive conduct against the Nous Research open source AI agent software which competes with claude code by intentionally selectively overbilling hermes users?
I saw this bug mentioned on Reddit a few days ago when it first got reported and someone said it was also triggered by certain file names used in OpenClaw.
I don't think it's as sinister as you're implying. I think it's part of them disallowing 3rd party clients from using Claude Code subscription and someone making a bad assumption that certain files in a repo being a good signal that someone is attempting to bypass those rules.
It's still not a good look for Anthropic, but I don't take this as a secret attempt to sabotage a competitor. I take it as them trying to enforce rules that they had very publicly announced.
Searching for the strings of configuration files of other agents in a codebase's git history in order to "detect" unauthorised usage is such a stupid idea I know it 100% came from Claude, and I doubt any of the vibesloppers working at Anthropic bothered to turn their brain on enough for the 5 seconds of thinking it would take to grasp that fact.
Waiting for customer service to make a comeback. It seems like SaaS is an infinite see of shitty chatbots doing a whole lot of brand damage. Basically for any service that I use, whenever I am forced to interact with a chatbot, that company takes a critical hit to its reputation going forward because the interaction is never anything but enraging.
> Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.
Ah yes, cause who bothers to test any releases to actual paying customers
there was a time when tech companies gave bug bounties. Now it's fuck you, we vibe coded this slop, and we love it. Oh we emailed your company, ran massive marketing campaigns in the media to pitch replacing you.
This is annoying since I have a side project I like to use alchemical names in, and HERMES.md sounds like something I would do. Guess I have to go with AGRIPPA.md, but Hermes Trismegistus is so much cooler...
I wonder when Anthropic will give refunds for all the sessions with nerfed / dumbed down Opus.
AI company not giving a refund?
I think people put this out of proportion. Yes, you can reason this is ethically correct - I don't object to this. But people used Anthropic, Claude etc... in the first place. Why would you use something to then be disappointed about how it performs, when it comes to AI? Would not be the better and easier strategy to ... not use it in the first place, and make yourself dependable on AI? I don't fully understand this. I would not run into a similar situation because I simply don't use any AI. I actively want to support those folks who don't use AI either - that way we can point out all the ill effects of AI, such as in the case of Anthropic to prioritize on greed.
They just lost the Claude lottery, that’s all.
They're humanists. Haven't you seen those awesome chalk drawings outside their hq?
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”
Another reason to avoid Anthropic products now.
Giving them access to your account or credit card is a bit wild. That's what prepaid cards are for. You charge it with exact amount of money you need to pay for what you want and leave it empty after you pay. You can later watch for bounced payment request to help evaluate their reputation. At this point Anthropic is about as reputable as shady porn site.
See also: privacy.com
(Virtual card provider that generates cards as a free-to-the-user service. They make their money from a cut of the standard transaction fees. Cards are locked to a single merchant and it’s easy to configure limits.)
We need extra laws to punish companies that try to fend of human users with AI "support" bullshit.
Allow users to file a lawsuit against the company using AI against their customers and judge the company only on what the AI generated without a chance to add anything more in their defense. Also any boilerplate legalese the AIs will quote in reaction to such laws is null and void.
Suddenly every AI support channel will have an "escalate to human support" button.
Another slop coded piece of shit causing stupid bugs.
I can’t believe they paid 100m for some of these employees. They could have bought entire companies of real developers.
Oh, no it was absolutely on purpose. Why else you'd have code that looks for a certain string in commit and does the reroute ?
That has a chance to be the highest opportunity cost bug in history ...
Google worked for tens of years to make people disgusted and hating them. Big AI companies succeeded in just a few years, so AI must be an accelerator.
"We're already losing literal fuck-tons of money by the minute, so we can't afford to refund you for our mistake."
Yet another reason i’m only interested in open source local models.
Welcome to the Global Hormuz.
The deeper into the new world order, the more you'll be charged for every breath, by design and by bugs-as-features all the same, refunds be against technofascist manifestos.
C'mon folks, let's stop using Claude|ChatGPT|etc en masse. It's time to start the revolution (from our beds, at least)
Already way ahead of you. I never started so I consider myself a winner.
On other hand I wonder what other filenames one could include in their repos to cause this sort of behaviour. Kinda a nudge towards people leaving these tools.
I tried to switch to a competing inferencing platform but they have billing issues as well.
I'm in. What's next?
Invest in local and open source LLMs. They are not as advanced as proprietary ones, but we can all use them and define them as the standard. We don't need closed models
Use your brain to solve problems not a computer.
Local LLMs.
Krasis is one such tool that allows large models using blended GPU/RAM.
ik_llama for better performance than llama.
ComfyAI for local image generation.
Nanocrab seems better for orchestration. Still need a good system capability firewall.
Who’s buying the memory for this effort?
Think how cheap its gonna be when everyone abandons the cloud providers and they start selling the 50B of hardware they over-invested in
The only revolution that got started in beds successfully so far was the sexual one.
I think one day later the guy got his refund? You all need to chill I feel like. HN is a bubble sometimes
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...