At first -- since the email was to me, with a link to a Google Form if I personally wanted to appeal -- I thought it must be an individualized ban (at least after deciding it wasn’t a phishing attempt). I couldn’t figure out why, but it set me searching my mind for possible triggers in my recent activity.
On Slack, though, it quickly became apparent this was actually an organization-wide ban. And none of us had been warned, including our account admins. We submitted the Google Form, but that was just a black hole. We’re waiting to hear back still a day and a half later.
But this is insane for a number of reasons:
1. Banning an organization for the behavior of an individual is a recipe for disaster in a business context. Disgruntled employees, incompetent interns -- anyone could maliciously or accidentally revoke Claude access for the whole business.
2. We didn’t just have a Claude Team plan, we also had an API account, which is paid for separately but had the same admins. The API account continues to allow us to use our API keys and sent us a renewal bill yesterday (after the Team account suspension). But none of our admins can actually view usage or billing, because our email addresses were banned.
3. Banning without warning makes every move dangerous. Was it because we had conversations about fertilizer? GPS satellites? other agriculture-related things? We can’t know and can’t avoid it.
We’ve reached out to Anthropic via a number of channels but have received only radio silence. There was a twitter thread about a similar issue (https://x.com/patomolina/status/2045281665363386504), and we tried DM’ing the Anthropic employee who chimed in there. Also no response. I’m sure if we wait long enough we’ll come to some form of resolution here, but you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business.
