I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file? (opens in new tab)

I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer).

Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did.

Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts.

I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out.

I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

Similar thing happened to me back in November 19 shortly after GitHub outage (which sent CC into repeated requests and time outs to GitHub) while beta testing Claude Code Web.

Banned and appeal declined without any real explanation to what happened, other than saying "violation of ToS" which can be basically anything, except there was really nothing to trigger that, other than using their most of the free credits they gave to test CC Web in less than a week. (No third party tools or VPN or anything really) There were many people had similar issues at the same time, reported on Reddit, so it wasn't an isolated case.

Companies and their brand teams work hard to create trust, then an automated false-positive can break that trust in a second.

As their ads say: "Keep thinking. There has never been a better time to have a problem."

I've been thinking since then, what was the problem. But I guess I will "Keep thinking".

I was banned as well, out of the blue suddenly and without warning. I believe it was because I was either doing something like what OP was doing AND/OR using the allowed limits to their fullest extent.

It completely blew me away and I felt suddenly so betrayed. I was paying $200/mo to fully utilize a service they offered and then without warning I apparently did something wrong and had no recourse. No one to ask, no one to talk to.

My advice is to be extremely wary of Anthropic. They paint themselves as the underdog/good guys, but they are just as faceless as the rest of them.

Oh, and have a backup workflow. Find / test / use other LLMs and providers. Don't become dependent on a single provider.

I also got banned from Claude over a year ago. The signup process threw an error and I couldn't try again because they took my phone number. The support system was a Google form petition to be unblocked. I am still mad about it to this day.

Edit: my only other comment on HN is also complaining about this 11 months ago

If you are in europe you might be able to force them to give you a reason, for an actual human to respond, and who knows maybe even get unbanned.

I have a friend that had a similar experience with amazon, and using an european online platform specific for this he actually got amazon to reopen his business account.

There is a useful list of these european complaints platforms at the bottom of this page: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...

I am really confused as to what happened here. The use of ‘disabled organization’ to refer to the author made it extra confusing.

I think I kind of have an idea what the author was doing, but not really.

We really need some law to stop "you have been banned and we won't even tell you actual reason for it", it's become a plague, made worse with automated systems giving out a ban

The future (the PRESENT):

You are only allowed to program computers with the permission of mega corporations.

When Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini have banned you, you must leave the industry.

When you sign up, you must provide legal assurance that no LLM has ever banned you (much like applying for insurance). If true then you will be denied permission to program - banned by one, banned by all.

They don't actually know this is why they were banned:

> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.

> Or I don't know. This is all just a guess from me.

And no response from support.

I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you expect.

Out of all of the tech organizations, frontier labs are the one org you'd expect to be trying out cutting edge forms of support. Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit?

I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical. Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let loose.

I also think it's essential for the anthropic platform in the long-run. And not just in the obvious ways (customer loyalty etc). I don't know if anyone has brought this up at Anthropic, but it's such a huge risk for Anthropic's long-term strategic position. They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support, then why should we?"

This blog post feels really fishy to me.

It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are.

For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.

I've noticed an uptick in

    API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"Output blocked by content filtering policy"},

recently, for perfectly innocuous tasks. There's no information given about the cause, so it's very frustrating. At first I thought it was a false positive for copyright issues, since it happened when I was translating code to another language. But now it's happening for all kinds of random prompts, so I have no idea.

According to Claude:

    I don't have visibility into exactly what triggered the content filter - it was likely a false positive. The code I'm writing (pinyin/Chinese/English mode detection for a language learning search feature) is completely benign.

I was recently kicked out from ChatGPT because I wrote "a*hole" in a context where ChatGPT constantly kept repeating nonsense! I find the ban by OpenAI to be very intrusive. Remember, ChatGPT is a machine! And I did not hurt any sentient being with my statement, nor was the GPT chat public. As long as I do not hurt any feeling beings with my thoughts, I can do whatever I want, can't I? After all, as the saying goes, "Thoughts are free." Now, one could argue that the repeated use of swear words, even in private, negatively influences one's behavior. However, there is no repeated use here. I don't run around the flat all day swearing. Anyone who basically insinuates such a thing, like OpenAI, is, as I said, intrusive. I want to be able to use a machine the way I want to! As long as no one else is harmed, of course...

I had very similar experience with my disabled organization on another provider. After 3 hours of my script sending commands to gemini-cli for execution i got disabled and then in 2 days my gmail was disabled. Good thing that it was disposable account, not the primary one.

> AI moderation is currently a "black box" that prioritizes safety over accuracy to an extreme degree.

I think there's a wide spread in how that's implemented. I would certainly not describe Grok as a tool that's prioritized safety at all.

That's why we should strive to use and optimize local LLMs.

Or better yet, we should setup something that allows people to share a part of their local GPU processing (like SETI@home) for a distributed LLM that cannot be censored. And somehow be compensated when it's used for inference

I was also banned from claude. I created an account and created a single prompt: "Hello, how are you?". After that I was banned. An automated system flagged me as doing something against the ToS.

I had my Claude Code account banned a few months ago. Contacted support and heard nothing. Registered a new account and been doing the same thing ever since - no issues.

I'm reading this just as I am working on a PWA that uses Bun.Terminal to spawn Claude Code and xterm.js to mirror its TUI on the web to expose Claude Code in a way where I can use it while I'm on the phone with TailScale.

I didn't really think about this until now (I am just solving my problem), but I guess I could get OpenCode'd for this. Similar to the OP I don't find I am doing anything particularly weird, but if their use case wasn't looked upon favorably by Anthropic, mine probably won't be either.

After the OpenCode drama where some people got banned for using it I saw some people from Anthropic on Twitter asking folks to DM them if they got banned and they'd get unbanned. I know I wouldn't be doing that, so I guess if I get banned, I am back to Codex for a while.

Why is the author so confused about the use of the word "organization"? Every account in Claude is part of an organization even if it's an organization of one. It's just the way they have accounts structured. And it's not like they hide this fact. It shows you your organization ID right on your account page. I'm also pretty sure I've seen the term used when performing other account-related actions.

This is scary and it affects the degree to which I invest in building Claude-specific tooling, either code or in my brain. You can never guarantee that a dangerously-skip-permissions session is going to stay on the rails, what flags it might trip while you're not looking.

I wonder if Anthropic realizes the chilling effect this kind of event has on developers. It's not just the ones who get locked out -- it's a cost for everybody, because we can't depend on the tool when it's doing precisely what it's best at.

Personally, I am already avoiding Gemini because a) I don't really understand their policy for training on your data; and b) if Google gets mad at me I lose my email. (Which the author also notes.)

Another instance of "Risk Department Maoism".

If you're wondering, the "risk department" means people in an organization who are responsible for finding and firing customers who are either engaged in illegal behavior, scamming the business, or both. They're like mall rent-a-cops, in that they don't have any real power beyond kicking you out, and they don't have any investigatory powers either. But this lack of power also means the only effective enforcement strategy is summary judgment, at scale with no legal recourse. And the rules have to be secret, with inconsistent enforcement, to make honest customers second-guess themselves into doing something risky. "You know what you did."

Of course, the flipside of this is that we have no idea what the fuck Hugo Daniel was actually doing. Anthropic knows more than we do, in fact: they at least have the Claude.md files he was generating and the prompts used to generate them. It's entirely possible that these prompts were about how to write malware or something else equally illegal. Or, alternatively, Anthropic's risk department is just a handful of log analysis tools running on autopilot that gave no consideration to what was in this guy's prompts and just banned him for the behavior he thinks he was banned for.

Because the risk department is an unaccountable secret police, the only recourse for their actions is to make hay in the media. But that's not scalable. There isn't enough space in the newspaper for everyone who gets banned to complain about it, no matter how egregious their case is. So we get all these vague blog posts about getting banned for seemingly innocuous behavior that could actually be fraud.

I was asking Claude for sci-fi book recommendations "theme similar to X, awarded Y or Z").

I was also banned for that. Also didn't get the "FU" in email. Thankfully at least I didn't pay for this, but I'd file chargeback instantly if I could.

If anyone from Claude is reading it, you're c**s.

Can someone explain what he was actually doing here?

Was the issue that he was reselling these Claude.md files, or that he was selling project setup or creation services to his clients?

Or maybe all scaffolding activity (back and forth) looked like automated usage?

I've triggered similar conversation level safety blocks on a personal Claude account by using an instance of Deepseek to feed in Claude output and then create instructions that would be copied back over to Claude (there wasn't any real utility to this, it was just an experiment). Which sounds kind of similar to this. I couldn't understand what the heuristic was trying to guard against, but I think it's related to concerns about prompt injections and users impersonating Claude responses. I'm also surprised the same safeguards would exist in either the API or coding subscription.

You are lucky they refunded you. Imagine they didn't ban you and you continued to pay 220 a month.

I once tried Claude made a new account and asked it to create a sample program it refused. I asked it to create a simple game and it refused. I asked it to create anything and it refused.

For playing around just go local and write your own multi agent wrapper. Much more fun and it opens many more possibilities with uncensored llms. Things will take longer but you'll end up at the same place.. with a mostly working piece of code you never want to look at.

So you have two AIs. Let's call them Claude and Hal. Whenever Claude gets something wrong, Hal is shown what went wrong and asked to rewrite the claude.md prompt to get Claude to do it right. Eventually Hal starts shouting at Claude.

Why is this inevitable? Because Hal only ever sees Claude's failures and none of the successes. So of course Hal gets frustrated and angry that Claude continually gets everything wrong no matter how Hal prompts him.

(Of course it's not really getting frustrated and annoyed, but a person would, so Hal plays that role)

OT: Has anyone observed that Claude Code in CLI works more reliably than the web or desktop apps?

I can run very long, stable sessions via Claude Code, but the desktop app regularly throws errors or simply stops the conversation. A few weeks ago, Anthropic introduced conversation compaction in the Claude web app. That change was very welcome, but it no longer seems to work reliably. Conversations now often stop progressing. Sometimes I get a red error message, sometimes nothing at all. The prompt just cannot be submitted anymore.

I am an early Claude user and subscribed to the Max plan when it launched. I like their models and overall direction, but reliability has clearly degraded in recent weeks.

Another observation: ChatGPT Pro tends to give much more senior and balanced responses when evaluating non-technical situations. Claude, in comparison, sometimes produces suggestions that feel irrational or emotionally driven. At this point, I mostly use Claude for coding tasks, but not for project or decision-related work, where the responses often lack sufficient depth.

Lastly, I really like Claude’s output formatting. The Markdown is consistently clean and well structured, and better than any competitor I have used. I strongly dislike ChatGPT’s formatting and often feed its responses into Claude Haiku just to reformat them into proper Markdown.

Curious whether others are seeing the same behavior.

I dont know what really happened here. Maybe his curse word did prompt a block, maybe something else caused the block.

But to be honest I've been cursing a lot to Claude Code, im migrating a website from WordPress to NextJS. And regardless of my instructions I copy paste every prompt I send it keeps not listening and assuming css classes & simpliying HTML structure. But when I curse it actually listens, I think cursing is actually a useful tool in interacting with LLM's.

> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.

Is it me or is this word salad?

There needs to be a law that prevents companies from simply banning you, especially when it's an important company. There should be an explanation and they shouldn't be allowed to hide behind some veil. There should be a real process with real humans that allow for appeals etc instead of scripts and bots and automated replies.

You are probably triggering their knowledge distillation checks.

> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.

This... sounds highly concerning

See it as a honour with distinction: the future skynet AI (aka Claude) considers you as person with his/her own opinion.

By the way, since as of late, google search redirects me to a "are you a bot?" question constantly. The primary reason is because I no longer use google search directly via the browser, but instead via the commandline (and for some weird reason chrome does not keep my settings, as I start it exclusively via the --no-sandbox option). We really need alternatives to Google - this is getting out of hand how much top-down control these corporations now have over our digital lives.

Forget the ethical or environmental concerns, I don't want to mess with LLMs because it seems like everyone who goes heavy on them ends up sounding like they're on the verge of cracking up.

I did 10k worth of tokens in a month and never had issues with tokens or stuff. I am on the 100 dollar max plan so I did not pay 10k - my wife would have killed me lol

PS: screenshot of my usage (and that was during the holidays https://x.com/eibrahim/status/2006355823002538371?s=46

PPS: I LOVE CLAUDE but I never had to deal with their support so don’t have feedback there

This is what happens when you make all the h100/h200/equivalent cards exclusive and lock them up in warehouses. We have no way of running these models locally… yet. Keyword is yet, the exclusivity period is going to end just like it did for 3D graphics when 3DFX democratized it with the voodoo cards. They’re only 300gb of memory and a chip ahead. It’ll shrink.

Side question, I am currently using Github copilot, what would be a good reason to switch provider? Looks like I am almost the only one I here using it.

i accidently logged in from my browser that is set to use a socks proxy instead of chrome which i dont set to a proxy and was otherwise using claude code with. they quickly banned me and refunded my subscription. i dont know if its worth it to try to appeal. does a human even read those appeals? figured i could just use cursor and gemini models with api pricing. but im sad to not be able to try claude code i had just signed up.

While it sucks, I had great results replacing Sonnet 4.5 with GLM 4.7 in Claude code. Vastly more affordable too ($3 a month for the pro equivalent). Can’t say much about Opus though. Claude code forces me to put a credit card on file so they can charge over usage. I don’t mind they charge me, I do mind that there’s no apparent spending limit and hard to tell how much “inclusive” opus tokens I have left.

I am doing very similar thing to this and no issue. Even though I am using GLM 4.7 due to cost

I have a complete org hierarchy for Claudes. Director, EM and Worker Claude Code instances working on a very long horizon task.

Code is open source: https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator

Seems weird, I have Claude's review other claude's work all the time. Maybe not as adversarily as that lol, i tend to encourage the instances to work collectively.

Also the API timeouts that people complain about - i see them on my Linux box a fair bit, especially when it has a lot of background tasks open, but it seems pretty rock solid on my Windows machine.

Claude started to get "wonky" about a month ago. It refused to use instructions files I generated using a tool I wrote. My account was not banned but many of the things I usually asked would just not produce any real result. Claude was working but ignoring some commands. I finally canceled my subscription and I am trying other providers.

If you're reading this, Anthropic, it's suicide. I will actively look for a way to cancel my $200/month subscription if you keep killing paying developers' accounts without warning. It is simply too risky to start depending on Claude Code if you are going to become Apple in terms of support.

Blocking xAI is also bad karma.

Whoops, I literally did the same thing as this guy earlier this week, but did the testing using `claude -p` so I can identify when Claude Code would (or would not) load Skills for a particular prompt, so that I could improve the skill definition.

Who knew that using Claude to introspect on itself was against the ToS?

I was reminded of this classic short story by Isaac Asimov, The feeling of Power: https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/2up

> If you are automating prompts that look like system instructions (i.e. scaffolding context files, or using Claude to find errors of another Claude and iterate on its CLAUDE.md, or etc...), you are walking on a minefield.

Lol, what is the point in this software if you can't use it for development?

The post is light on details. I'd guess the author ended up hammering the API and they decided it was abuse.

I expect more reports like this. LLM providers are already selling tokens at a loss. If everyone starts to use tmux or orchestrate multiple agents then their loss on each plan is going to get much larger.

This is very cool. I looked at the Claude.md he was generating and it is basically all of Claude's failure modes in one file. I can think of a few reasons why Anthropic would not want this information out in the open or for someone to systematically collate all the data into one file.

Exactly as predicted: the means of production yet again taken away from the masses to be centralized in a few absurdly rich hands.

I ran out of tokens for not just the 5 hour sessions, but all models for the week. Had to wait a day -- so my methadone equivalent was to strap an endpoint-rewriting proxy to Claude Code and backend it with a local Qwen3 30B Coder. It was.. somewhat adequate. Just as fast, but not as capable as Opus 4.5 - I think it could handle carefully specced small greenfield projects, but it was getting tangled in my Claudefield mess.

All that to say -- be prepared, have a local fallback! The lords are coming for your ploughshares.

So you were generating and evaluating the performance of your CLAUDE.md files? And you got banned for it?

I clicked your link to go look at the innocent Claude.md file as you invited us to do. Only problem: there is no Claude.md file in your repo! What are you trying to hide? Are you some kind of con man?

Looks like Claude.ai had the right idea when they banned you.

Claude is going wild lately. It told me I had used up 75% of my weekly limit. Ohhhk. I sent one more short query, and boom blocked til til Monday because i used up 25% in that one go (on thursday). How is that possible? Its falling off fast right now.

I have also been a bit paranoid about this in terms of using Claude itself to decompile/deobfuscate Claude code in order to patch it to create the user experience I need. Looks like I’ll be using other tools to do that from now on.

In Open WebUI I have different system prompts (startup advisor, marketing expert, expert software engineer etc) defined and I use Claude via OpenRouter.

Is this going to get me banned? If so i'll switch to a different non-anthropic model.

As a Claude Max user, that generally prefer’s claude, I will say that Gemini is working pretty well right now and I’m considering setting up a google workspace account so I can get Gemini with decent privacy.

Luckily there is little vendor lock in and likes of https://opencode.ai/ are picking up the slack

That's why I run a local Qwen3-Next model on an NVIDIA Thor dev kit (Apple Silicon and DGX Spark are other options but they are even more expensive for 128GB VRAM)

Not that it’s the same thing, but how real is it to have a locally setup model for coding?

Granted, it’s not going to be Claude scale but it’d be nice to do some of it locally.

This is why it's worth investing in a model-agnostic setup. Don't tie yourself into a single model provider!

OpenHands, Toad, and OpenCode are fully OSS and LLM-agnostic

The news is not that they turned off this account. The news is that this user understands very little about the nature of zero sum context mathematics. The mentioned Claude.md is a totally useless mess. Anthropic is just saving themselves from the token waste of this strategy on a fixed billing rate plan.

If the OP really wants to waste tokens like this, they should use a metered API so they are the one paying for the ineffectiveness, not Anthropic.

(Posted by someone who has Claude Max and yet also uses $1500+ a month of metered rate Claude in Kilo Code)

Yikes. And I just switched to using OpenCode instead of Claude-Code (because it's so much better), guess I'm in danger.

Isn't it a ban because he had multiple accounts ?

> We may modify, suspend, or discontinue the Services or your access to the Services.

I was banned from just trying out Claude AI chat for the first time a few months ago. I emailed them and restored my account access.

Hmm so how are the alternatives? Just in case I will get banned for nothing as well. I’m riding cc with opus all day long these days.

Fun times for IT sec. Prompt injection, not to exfiltrate data, but to ban whole org from AI tools. This could be fun.

I'm under heavy impression that their quota-calculating algorithms was vibe coded and has a whole lot of bugs.

i got banned from linkedin, because their ai believes my job post violates their terms, the very same job post i generated with linkedin's ai. appealed and got rejected. now i need to rebuild my account with 3k connections from scratch. monopolies need better regulation!

Why would this org be banned for shuffling Claude.md files ? I don't understand the harm here.

> Organizations of late capitalism, unite!

Saying this is "late Capitalism" is an irresponsible distraction. Capitalism runs fine when appropriately regulated with strong regulations on corporations, especially monopolies, high taxes on the wealthy, and pervasive unionization. We collectively decided to let Capitalism go wild without boundaries and the results are caused by us and our responsibility. Just like driving fast with a badly maintained vehicle may lead to a crash, Capitalism is a system that requires some regulation to run properly.

If you have an issue with LLMs and how they are managed then you should take responsibility for your own use of tools and not blame the economic system.

this is informative, the comments here are good too and a big heads up for me. typing swear words into a computer has been a time honored tradition of mine, and I would have never guessed google and the like would ban for this sort of thing, so TIL!

I can't wait to be able to run this kind of software locally, on my own buck.

But I've seen orgs bite the bullet in the last 18 months and what they deployed is miles behind what Claude Code can do today. When the "Moore's Law" curve for LLM capability improvements flattens out, it will be a better time to lock into a locally hosted solution.

What is "scaffolding?"

is there a benefit of using a separate claude instance to update the CLAUDE.md of the first? I always want to leverage the full context of the situation to help describe what went wrong, so doing it "inline" makes more sense.

I've been using Claude Code with AWS Bedrock as the provider. Setup guide if you're interested: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/amazon-bedrock

Is it time to move to open source and run model locally with an DGX Spark?

We need local models asap.

>Yes, the only e-mail I got was a credit note giving my money back.

That's great news ! They don't have nearly enough staff to deal with support issues, so they default to reimbursement. Which means if you do this every month, you get Claude for free :)

It should be mentionned in the title that these are just speculations.

> Or I don't know. This is all just a guess from me.

Thinking 220GBP for a high-limit Claude account is the kind of thinking that really takes for granted the amount of compute power being used by these services. That's WITH the "spending other people's money" discount that most new companies start folks off with. The fact that so many are painfully ignorant of the true externalities of these technologies and their real price never ceases to amaze me.

I was banned for simply accessing Claude via VPN.

Nothing in their EULA or ToS says anything about this.

And their appeal form simply doesn't work. Out of my four requests to lift the ban, they've replied once and didn't say anything about the nature about that. They just declined.

Fuck Claude. Seriously. Fuck Claude. Maybe they've got too much money, so they don't care about their paying customers.

We need a collapse in AI to right the ships of AI like the the dotcom bubble burst. If we do it now, it will hurt less. Novel ideas in AI will succeed and materials costs will lower. Memory being so bought up till 2029 is not a good thing for anyone especially if we need to see a successful future in AI. More efficient systems and so on.

Similar thing happened to me 3 months ago. To this day no response to any appeals. I've actually started a GDPR request to see why I got banned, which they're stretching out as long as possible (to the latest possible deadline) so far.

Well at least they didn't email the press and called the FBI on you?

do you know for sure this was the reason why?

Anthropic is the worst ai company.

Absolutely disgusting behavior pirating all those books. The founder spreading fear to hype up his business. The likely relentless shilling campaigns all over social media. Very likely lying about quantizing selectively.

RIP. I hear they're looking for janitors.

Why are so many people so obsessed with feeding as many prompts/data as possible to LLMs and generating millions of lines of code?

What are you gonna do with the results that are usually slop?

Scamthropic at it again

> Like a lot of my peers I was using claude code CLI regularly and trying to understand how far I could go with it on my personal projects. Going wild, with ideas and approaches to code I can now try and validate at a very fast pace. Run it inside tmux and let it do the work while I went on to do something else

This blog post could have been a tweet.

I'm so so so tired of reading this style of writing.

I was also banned several months ago, but I don’t think it happened because I created a CLAUDE.md file or anything like that. I have no idea why I was banned, since I only used Claude Code for typical CRUD projects - where AI really excels. Here’s my timeline:

1. Claude Code stopped working. 2. I received an email about the ban. 3. Fine, time to contact support. I've wrote to them. 4. I got an automated message saying they were reviewing my case. 5. I received a refund (I had a Pro plan) in the meantime. 6. After a few days I got this funny email:

Hi there,

We're reaching out to people who recently canceled their Claude Code subscription in order to understand why you decided to cancel.

We'd like to invite you to participate in an AI-moderated interview about your experience with Claude Code—including what improvements you'd like to see us make.

This approach uses an AI interviewer to ask you questions and respond to your answers, creating a conversational experience you can complete at your convenience.

Here's what you need to know:

The interview takes 15-20 minutes to complete This interview will be available until Monday October 13 at 9pm PT For completing the interview, you'll receive a $40 USD (or local equivalent) Amazon gift card within 3-5 business days Please complete only one interview per person As much as possible, help us know you're not a bot by showing your beautiful human face!

Your survey may terminate early if you record illegible video content (ex: overly loud environments, aren't well lighted, etc) Participate Now

This interview is administered by a third party, Listen Labs. By participating in the interview, you agree to Listen Labs' Privacy Policy. Anthropic may use your responses to improve our services and follow up.

Your honest feedback—whether your experience was positive, challenging, or mixed—is invaluable in helping us understand how to make Claude Code work better for developers like you.

Thank you for your time and insights!

–The Anthropic Team

7. Wait, you banned me and now you’re sending me this email? Seriously? Okay, I decided to participate in the survey. Unfortunately, when I selected the option that it was due to a bug or some issue, they ended the survey. No gift card.

8. A few days later, I received an email saying they couldn’t reinstate my account because I had violated their usage policy. How? No idea.

9. After a few more days, I got an email saying they had reinstated my account. They also mentioned they believed it was a bug.

It was crazy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I got my €220 back (ouch that's a lot of money for this kind of service, thanks capitalism).

I'm not sure I understand the jab here at capitalism. If you don't want to pay that, then don't.

Isn't that the point of capitalism?

bow down to our new overlords - dont' like it? banned, with no recourse - enjoy getting left behind, welcome to the future old man

I always take these sorts of "oh no I was banned while doing something innocent" posts with a large helping of salt. At least the ones where someone is complaining about a ban from Stripe, usually it turns out they are doing something that either violates the terms of service or is actually fraudulent. None the less its quite frustrating dealing with these because either way.

You mean the throwaway pseudonym you signed up with was banned, right?

… right ?

Just stop using Anthropic. Claude Code is crap because they keep putting in dumb limits for Opus.

This feels... reasonable? You're in their shop (Opus 4.5) and they can kick you out without cause.

But Claude Code (the app) will work with a self-hosted open source model and a compatible gateway. I'd just move to doing that.