Posted by ayi 19 hours ago
Ask HN: Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do
Even after I contacted support I got a generic "we have determined that we cannot reinstate your account at this time due to a violation of our Usage Policy" answer.
I'm not using it for anything unusal. "Summarize that markdown file", "how can i refactor payment module" kind of questions mostly. I couldn't even move to real coding because 1 hour was only enough for investigation.
My last chance is HN to get some visibility on my case. My Boris sees it or some other Anthropic employee.
Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back?
If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.)
Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out.
In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.
I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh.
>I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour
That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions.
I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money.
Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!
"If Lucifer decided not to take your soul, why not throw yourself at Mammon's feet instead?"
We keep asking why society got to such this stage of decay, and I need to keep reminding myself that a lot of it is people who give away so much power to sociopaths in exchange of virtual trinkets.
I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too.
I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.
Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.
There are OpenSource versions of CodeX.
For example:
* OpenCode: https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-...
* CodeX with OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli
You use the model you need. You don't need to use always the top tier model for anything. That is your decision. You can use a top tier for planing and then the agents can use cheap Chinese models. Much more cost effective.
In fact, I don't actually use it, but as an experiment I once set up and fooled around with an OpenRouter account over Tor. It did demand an email address, and I gave it a Proton account also set up over Tor. Both were paid for with anonymous cryptocurrency: Monero gatewayed via some random exchanger.
Whereas I never signed up for an Anthropic account because the first screen I hit demanded a phone number. I mean that was the only thing on the screen, and you weren't going anywhere until you provided it. It's been quite a while, though.
Perhaps there are different paths to getting accounts.
If you're paid a Western salary and using the model interactively (eg. For coding), you are wasting time+money by using the less good models.
I don't want monthly subs to infrequently used models that I sometimes tap into.
...pretty much that's it. My 10 bucks at OpenRouter has lasted me several months for these edge cases.
I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.
There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.
I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.
Of course, for larger transactions you'd expect that a human in the loop could work with you to get the right info so that they would be covered. But I guess for Microsoft, their definition of "larger" might be more than a few grand...
Tried a few things, but eventually just gave up and opened a new account (fortunately I hadn't made many purchases)
There's no way to update the billing address of my US bank to a foreign address. My UK bank is in the address of my house there. My French bank is in the address of my house here.
As I said, you get one and only one guess as to how the company in question wants to handle this. I want to buy Minecraft for my kid's birthday. Do I buy it from the US store with my US card because that's where I lived when I set up my Microsoft account? Do I buy it in the French store with my French card (with that US Microsoft account)?
Answer: Both of those will get you permanently banned from buying Minecraft on that account. There's a Secret Third Answer, but there's no way of knowing it in advance (or even after the fact since there is no functional customer support that knows about this issue).
Banks go out of their way for HNW individuals, which it sounds like you are with 3 seperate residences in 3 different countries, I’d check to see if you qualify.