Ask HN: Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do
51
aayi about 3 hours ago 49 comments
After using Claude Code at work for months I wanted to use it on my own projects too. Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned after 1 hour of usage. I got my 120$ back. 1 month later I signed up with vpn off. But this time probably because I used the same credit cart (and that's the only card I can use) they banned me again.
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?
Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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 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.
"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.
Computers and LLMs are great at automation of low-level human cognitive tasks like memory, decisions and loops, etc. but struggle enormously with high cognitive tasks like reasoning, deep logic, nuance, etc. Not that it can't be done (Claude platform is proof that it can) - but the cost and scaling advantage in this realm belongs to the human brain, not the LLM.
Being banned on those platforms is a real setback for many users. One might argue that openai etc. are valid alternatives, but when they dropped fable (and perhaps reinstate?), not being able to use it simply means others can do more/better.
Hahahaha, this reads like pure unadulterated marketing. I sincerely hope you're getting paid for these things at least, it would be sad for you to be this way without even getting anything in return.
why comment then?
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.
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.
Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.
Earlier this week, your account was disabled by an automated system for being in violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy. Upon further investigation, we believe this was an error and your account has been reinstated. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
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.
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).
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.
For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.
Googles customer relations were “AI” before LLMs.
Been thinking of switching to a multi model harness anyway.
Also, I'll never be grateful enough for all the horror stories about Google accounts getting randomly banned - they were what finally pushed me to make a similar move.
Kiro.dev, w. cerebras?
Aider, w. groq (with a Q)?
Why the fuck are you renting your hammer, carpenter, from assholes who will capriciously take it away from you when you need it 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).