Posted by ayi 1 day 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?
Should be:
> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code unfairly and I don't know how to appeal
What does "I don't know what to do" even mean? Genuinely who cares if this happens? Its not like the old days where being banned from adsense could literally destroy your business... If this is how they treat you then screw them and just go use Codex or something.
It's genuinely insane to me how many people now seem unable to function without Claude.
I realised earlier I have multiple coworkers who literally could not work during the Anthropic outage. I use CC quite heavily, but I only found out about the outage after I noticed they were sending multiple messages about how they weren't able to work. Some people now seem to think that writing code by hand is a feat which humans can no longer do with any reasonable level of productivity. There's also a dude I work with who is really irritatingly running all his messages through Claude because his Slack messages have all the annoying hallmarks of Claude – e.g., "I'd like to highlight with you one very real issue [x] raised yesterday". I was trying to get hold of him during the outage and he suspiciously didn't reply until the outage was over.
Until today I thought it was a bit of a meme that people were becoming dependant on AI, but I'm starting to see it everywhere at this point...
> Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back?
I think you're asking the wrong question. I'd consider asking why you care so much. This should be a mild inconvenience at most.
I hate the idea of government throwing its weight around based on personal vendettas (in the case of this Fable debacle), so it's clear that if this tech is going to be foundation-level important to the economy going forward, we need some sort of laws guaranteeing our access to it.
But authoritarians in government aren't the only party we need to be concerned about. As shown by this post, the actual model companies themselves may have too much centralized power already.
Given all software development has essentially moved to AI-first, an authoritarian-minded Anthropic/OpenAI employee is currently able to pick winners in the economy by granting/withholding access to certain groups. That is the type of thing I think needs to be regulated, not some trivial cyber security abilities in the actual models themselves.
The Google-style B2C blanket ban with zero customer support approach isn't going to cut it if the models continue progressing at this rate and the lead ever widens with open source (which it likely will at some point).
If you want to be a piece of critical infrastructure, you need to deal with the implications of that. It's not OK for private entities to be able to "unperson" people in important parts of their lives for what amounts to convenience reasons. If them not being able to do that raises the price of the service, so be it.
Honestly even banks, which are already highly regulated and at least have more nominal competition, still have too much leeway to cut off customers based on error-prone statistical methods, without recourse or explanation.