HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

The official response feels AI generated. I suspect this is a preview of our future.

"You're totally right! I'm sorry but you're going to have to piss off anyway. Would you like to spend a few more hours discussing it with our AI chatbot? It won't help. But if it makes you feel better, it will probably cost us an extra $0.12 in tokens."

I'll bet the first human at Anthropic learns about this from HN.

Sounds illegal to me and I'm sure they'd lose in court if you were incorrectly billed for things completely out of your control.

My guess is this response was entirely written by an LLM that is instructed to never to offer refunds or compensation.

They're issuing refunds and extra credits https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655.

Maybe Anthropic is just testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Left unchallenged (court, charge back, whatever) why change course?

Wait, that was the actual response? With the DiCaprio clap? That wasn't a joke?

Refunds and compensation are different though aren’t they? I would not see being refunded for the billing as compensation, compensation would be something more like $x extra to make up for the inconvenience / to say sorry essentially.

This is fraud

Claude Code support admits that Anthropic has a policy to defraud customers

> This is very surprising.

Dude what is it with HN and using extra soft words that don't at all mean the actual thing they're supposed to mean.

Nothing there is a surprise.

This is very bullshit and probably (in a better world for sure) very illegal. Can't bill more than you've actually delivered and what the customer in advance agreed on.

Stop with this god-awful corporate-washed lingo. You're not being professional, you're skewing reality.

Isn't this illegal/fraudulent in many places? Pretty sure just randomly charging a customers payment method without their consent is definitely illegal.

They’re also objectively not “unable” they are “unwilling” and hiding behind policies as if they are unalterable laws is silly.

They are agreeing to a refund, but pushing back on further compensation above that. That's pretty fair. The previous paragraph says they'll action the refund.

I've definitely seen it happen in meal delivery apps, though whether those count as "legitimate businesses" is up to interpretation.

Not sure that reasoning has ever stood up in court.

The reply looks like it was written by an LLM. Not that this excuses anything.

Coz those that did not got sued to do. They need to get sued

Not surprising at all. They probably feel or expect to have many such issues that are not surfaced yet, because like with OpenAI goblin "issue" we see that these guys have no clue what they are doing.

So giving this guy his 200$ back would open the flood gates for other such requests. Their behaviour, as much as it is weird and antisocial, perhaps even breaking some laws - is completely logical in their own weird world of "Datacenter PhD nation" or whatever other bullshit they use to hype up their "product".

This billing cycle my account was billed an extra $200.

I investigated. I was being for a Claude Max gift subscription that has been sent to – what appears to be – a randomly generated 27 char alphanumeric icloud email account that bounces.

Apparently, Anthropic doesn't have a centralized process that allows you to approve, see or revoke "gift cards." And no I can't use this hypothetical gift card. Because I can't see what the system generated, when it generated it, and if the "gift" sent to this 27 character alphanumeric string was redeemed.

Their support bot doesn't work. As it's a possibly suspicious charge (I certainly didn't buy it), I've been trying to get them to revoke it. But the bot passes it to a human and their humans just close the ticket without comment.

I realize that people working at Anthropic are "just" researchers building cutting edge models. And that Claude is really great and all. But hasn't anyone told them about the global legal risk of incorrectly billing millions of people?

What is their legal risk team doing? Their ops team? Or, whoever else is responsible. Even their own models, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.5 and so on will flag this as a legal risk on "max" thinking.

Because even if $200M to $20M seems "insignificant" next to the however many billions they made in the quarter. Knowingly perpetuating fraudulent billing practises is a real legal risk with real prosecutorial (and financial) consequences. It's absurd to me that so much of legal risk analysis fixates on how users use the tools they pay for, but not what's an obvious trigger for class action lawsuits and prosecutorial investigations in most jurisdictions.

This isn't even a threat. The FTC has taken Uber to court, https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2... and is apparently seeking a few billion in fines?

https://www.independent.co.uk/us/money/uber-lawsuit-fines-bi...

Purposeful unauthorized billing was found to be fraudulent and defendants were made to fork over assets, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...

And this is government action in one jurisdiction. The EU has fines of 6% of global turnover, and yes, they too will seize assets if the fines are unpaid.

What I'm trying to say politely is, does the Anthropic team realize this is an insane legal risk. And to quote Trevor Moore's immortal words, "insanely illegal."

Why would you do this? Does anyone realize the implications of this? At all? Other than the AI models that the humans aren't paying attention to?

screenshots for anyone interested, https://x.com/_areoform/status/2048644232043434354

Why is this the top comment. The bug filer posted the copypasta joke Antrhopic response.

Edit: As a kind someone pointed out, I made the wrong assumption that the first response was entirely Anthropic’s, and not the author.

~~I mean, the worse part is the gif at the end of the message.~~

~~What are they even trying to do? What are they trying to convey? It just feels like being given the finger and getting my face rubbed in it on top of that.~~

At least Google pretended to not be evil for a few years

> I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault.

Granted, it was very much weasel words.

Nonetheless, I read it as they were issuing a refund ("Let me look up your account information to help process your refund request."), but couldn't offer compensation for pain, suffering, loss of use, tracking down the bug, etc.

I could be wrong, of course, precisely because it was (probably AI-generated) weasel words.

You also seem to have a bug where people get randomly invoiced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693679

I got a random invoice for $45.08 back in March, despite not having auto top up enabled. Trying to reach support met with a brick wall. Based on the post I linked to, I'm not the only one facing this problem.

Please do explain why someone at Anthropic decided, on purpose, to write code that says something along the lines of: "if ( git_history_str contains "HERMES.md" ... )" then { bill more money }

Somebody (or something) wrote this code. This bug wouldn't be happening for any other reason. It's not a glitch, an oversight, a feature gap, or a temporary outage. It is a piece of written code in your system.

Everyone here is upset about the $200, which is probably much less money than the time that engineer spent ranting about the overcharge on GitHub.

The real problem in my mind is that that bit of code existed in the first place.

Why?

Are you vibe coding your billing!?

Without review!?!?

Or worse, a human being decided to add this to your code base? And nobody noticed or flagged it during code review?

Or much, much worse, Anthropic is purposefully ripping off customers?

This deserves a thorough post-mortem.

But why did you say that

> I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical errors that result in incorrect billing routing.

What prevents you from issuing compensations?

"Our support flow wasn't set up"

Would be more accurate. It still isn't setup. Talking to a bot as support who only tells you to talk to the bot for support is not actually support at all. It looks like support, but there's no way to ACTUALLY GET support.

Thanks for the follow up here and the transparency.

For those of us not on X, what are the best communication channels for us to follow this sort of communication?

Could really use a post-mortem to set the story straight. The apparently-hallucinated support response copied-pasted by the submitter showing up in the github issue thread is very misleading without scrutiny

A side aspect of this drama is the root feature which enabled this bug:

> ugh sorry this was a bug with the 3rd party harness detection and how we pull git status into the system prompt

Claude wants to exercise control of how I use the "inclusive volume" that I purchased with my monthly subscription. This harms competition (someone else could write a more efficient or safer coding agent) and is generally not in the best interest of society. Why do we allow this?

This specific case is interesting, because it is so clear cut. There is no cross financing via ads, they already have the infrastructure to measure usage and even the infrastructure to bill extra usage. I also don't see how you can plausible make the argument that restricting usage to their blessed client is necessary for fair use or for the basic structure of their business model (this would be the standard argument for e.g. Youtube: Purposefully degrading the experience of their free client to not support background playback enables the subscription model).

I try to avoid jumping on the bandwagon when it's already covered but billing bugs being treated like other software issue and the major comms channel being X (which I can't get to load half the time) is ridiculous.

Have a look at https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/54497

I can’t use Claude Code online at all

Is it complex? I was somewhat taken aback by how simple it was. Still very confused as to how it could happen.

Hey Thariq, I love Claude! I use Claude every single day and it has changed my life, which is why I did what I'm about to describe.

Happy to talk privately, but as I detailed here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954005 . I've been billed $200 for a Max gift card to a 27 character alphanumeric icloud address that bounces.

I was looking through the system, and there are several UI/UX and process gaps in the gift card and billing order flow that expose Anthropic to significant liability. I'm genuinely not trying to concern troll or make some kind of overwrought threat here. Genuinely trying to be constructive. Let me give you an example.

I sent an email to Anthropic Support outlining the disputed / possibly malicious charge. The AI Agent / Claude instance agreed and replied with,

    Thank you for confirming.
    
    I've documented all the details about this unauthorized [specific amount + tax] charge for the Gift Max 20X subscription (invoice [lalala]) sent to [insert the random alphanumeric]@icloud.com.
    
    An error occurred while evaluating the refund eligibility for your account. Your request has been fully documented and our team will follow up with you shortly to investigate this unauthorized transaction and assist with the refund and cancellation.
    
    Best regards,

And then no one followed up, the conversation was closed without recourse and I wasn't allowed to reply.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with international trading practises, but in multiple jurisdictions, the AI agent assumed legal liability for Anthropic. It accepted that the charge was unauthorized / fraudulent, stated that redressal was needed, but then failed to offer the means to redress it / didn't allow for the refund to continue.

I am not a lawyer, but based on my understanding of prior cases (I read this kind of stuff for fun, don't ask) – in the EU, the US and Canada, users can approach courts and invoke the doctrine of promissory estoppel (again don't quote me on this, IANAL, just like reading case law). And if enough users are affected / do so, it becomes a deceptive practises issue.

I've been thinking about how to solve this problem, and as strange as it sounds, I think Anthropic already has the tools to make the best customer support service in human history. No exaggeration. I think that this crisis could be an opportunity.

I’ve had similar terrible experiences with the Claude support bot when my usage limit was disappearing after a few minutes using Sonnet. I asked for help, asked for escalation, asked for a human, anything. All I got was a non-answers from an AI. I won’t spend real money on Claude now. I’m ok with losing $20 if there’s a rug pull of one way or another, but not $200.

Please, please, please hire more humans with the actual ability to do the right thing for support if your AI agents can’t do the job.

> Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering.

What does that even mean? Does it mean, "our support flow is just an LLM that fobs off customers and puts their issues into the bin"? Or is there some genuine "routing" of simple bugs to engineering which accidentally drops "complex" bugs? Could you drescibe that process, it sounds fascinating?

Also, how is changing a customer's billing based on detecting a certain string in a certain place a "complex" bug? Grep the string, remove the if statement, done. I'd love a post-mortem about why this was a complex bug.

More questions than answers here Thariq.

Is there no constraint preventing extra usage billing from being used before regular usage billing has been exhausted?

hey guys can you please fix claude design? I've been trying to test it tonight and already used up 20% of my usage and all i get is continuous [unknown] missing EndStreamResponse errors (and this is after your status page reflected everything ok).

I have been badly affected - it killed my vibe.

More likely its just an LLM hallucination, not a real policy that Anthropic has. Unfortunately for them, it's a bad look to showcase one of the main failure modes of their product in their own business process.

More and more I feel that the one thing Github needs to turn the tide of bad press, is to allow adding clown or turd reaction emoji on comments

Brought to you by, allegedly, the "Good" AI company.

Because it's illegal.

In many countries, this also isn't legally tenable.

Bug filer posted that reply as a joke. Look at the username.

I think the OP posted that reply as a joke

Well, when your policy is written by an AI, you can get shit like that

Same.

Back in December the iOS app had a bug ( https://status.claude.com/incidents/6rrnsb1y0kbn) in which buying a subscription thru the Apple App Store would not register with the backend, so you’d be charged but not receive the plan entitlement.

I discovered this because I wanted to upgrade from free plan to the regular plan. I was charged, but remained in the free tier. Thinking it was a temporary bug, I tried buying the max plan. Same result.

I tried cancelling the plan and restarting but I when I went to buy the regular plan again, I was forever tagged as an “Apple” user and so could only manage the billing plan on the iOS app. I tried one more time, same result.

I tried interacting with the support bot and although it agreed that there was a bug and that it should be fixed and I should get a refund, my account never was able to get unstuck nor refunded. I lodged a refund request with Apple, which was relatively quickly refunded. The Bot never did escalate to a human as promised.

Even though the bug was ostensibly fixed, my account (personal email) remains in permanent limbo, unable to upgrade from Free to anything else (I tried again recently and same result - paid but stuck on free plan). I had to create a new gmail just to pay for Anthropic / Claude.

I once had PayPal refuse to give me my money back (for a delivery) for months even though the postal service status clearly stated: "Address unknown, returning to sender."

I should have denied the PayPal charge on my bank account, that always gets a real human to look into it. Lesson learned.

I got given a gift card with around 6 months credit on it. I used up 1 or 2, and last week suddenly the credit disappeared. I reached out through their chat bot, raised a ticket and have been emailing them daily. Nothing. Absolutely not a word. Unfortunately I dont have the option for a charge back.

Once the dispute was resolved on the card side did anthropic claw back the $100? Was your account penalized in anyway?

Apparently 200B isn't enough for proper support. Nice to know

somehow it's always the expensive path that works fine.

No bigsies just got a little trippy hallucination while vibing in the billing code bro. The spiritual support guru was walking the lonely wastelands and couldn't get back to you on this plane. Just wasn't meant to be

After going public and getting publicity. You shouldn't have to do that just to get a company to fix their own mistake. They stole $200, where do they get off saying they won't give it back?

This is the new world. Go viral? Get human customer service. Otherwise, piss off.

Because it hit HN frontpage ...

Yeah the initial response is stupid but this is getting resolved, not sure where the initial response OP gives in his git issue came from tbh. I only skimmed the git issue, perhaps they clarified.

Haha 200$ credits for the next time he has the word thanos spelled backwards in an even line of one of his yamls..

Going to the media always helps. Always.

_puts pitchfork away_

I guess this is what you get when you replace common sense with LLMs.

Too much vibe coding

Makes me very glad there’s so much tough competition. OpenAI is a flawed company but I’m glad they’re keeping up.

absolute masterclass in shooting yourself in the foot over the past month or two.

I don't know why anyone is still using this - much less defending them..

In the last MONTH, I've asked how you can defend implementing (or even choose implementing) AI when:

the AI you have implemented throughout your company changes the results you've come to trust? https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/13/claude_outage_quality...

or won't let you log in?: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/44257

or makes stuff up?: https://dwyer.co.za/static/claude-mixes-up-who-said-what-and...

or when it's down?: https://status.claude.com/incidents/6jd2m42f8mld

or when you get banned?: https://bannedbyanthropic.com/

or installs spyware: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

or takes the features you use out of the plan you subscribe to without notice? https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/22/anthropic_removes_cla...

or renders your IP legally unenforceable? https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-w...

or stealthily changes pricing terms based on... file names you have? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262

or invoices you for usage you did not perform, and won't answer support requests until you raise hell on social media? https://nickvecchioni.github.io/thoughts/2026/04/08/anthropi...

i mean seriously, why on earth would you use this? i thought we were professionals

Excuse me for being blunt but you would assume ai bros run a place like this, and ai bros can manage tech as much as crypto bros can manage monetary systems.

On the other hand they make good products.

I get the confusion -- it looks like the reporter of the bug just posted a raw email response that they got without adding any sort of decoration to make it clear it was from an email they got. At least, that's my reading of this.

I'm also not sure if the person/bot who responded was saying "No refund" or that they couldn't issue a refund, or if a Github Issue was an appropriate place to ask for a refund.

Let's hope a human on the other end is reading this and acting accordingly. It all seems like we're only seeing part of a story.

He's the guy who reported the bug. It looks like he copy-pasted an email from Anthropic without context, and the gif is his response.

sasha-id submitted the original bug report, and then bcherny confirmed that it was a bug and that it's been fixed.

Given that, it's almost guaranteed that sasha-id is a legitimate actor.

If you're confused about sasha-id's comment here (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...), it's because they just copied and pasted a support response from Anthropic.

All these claude issues are full of bots, sometimes bots replying to themselves and getting confused. It's impossible to tell what is a real issue and what is hallucination. I'm surprised anthropic even bothers to read them.

In this particular case I think the authors reply is them quoting what support told them?

I'm confused about the timeline of events; in the PR, the github actions user lists this as a possible duplicate of https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53171, which was created earlier, and doesn't seem to be have been edited after the fact. Did sasha-id just copy that bug report and get credit for discovering?

He is the original author who faced the bug. I believe he just copied the response he received from Antrophic

The second reply post was his copy and paste response from Anthropic's support staff along with a funny meme mocking it. He just didn't put it in a blockquote or quotation marks.

It was obvious to me, but I can see how somebody could get confused from that.

> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

Is the culture really such that you can't escalate an obvious, fairly minor mistake that is turning into disastrous PR?

That would explain a lot of recent Anthropic takes actually.

I’ve stopped using your product entirely. Anthropic may not like it, but I can do something about it.

"opinions are my own"

  - throwaway449933

> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" - Henry Ford

You mean you can't do much about it that wouldn't cost your job.

It reads like the inventors of Claude can't get Claude to apply a "human in the loop" workflow.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the system prompt that tells Claude what it is or isn't "able" to give refunds for. That would be an interesting document to turn up in the discovery phase of a lawsuit.

You could quit, for starters

you work there. there is at least one thing you could do about it.

So you're subservient to the AI already?

someone mentioned you use fin.ai for this, were they wrong?

A little human touch goes a long way with customer service and sales. Sorry your management makes you guys look so bad. But yea I am done with anthropic as well. No offense to you all actually making the thing.

why are you posting on HN? It'll only get you hate, this crowd is rabid

I don't know if it's necessarily about internal communication, it could be. But it's also a distinctive management style that I have seen in many places. The whole "ask for forgiveness not permission" type mentality. If you push something and get away with it, hey it worked!! If you push something and get any sort of push back, you take it back.

I had organizations leaders before say things that are so black and white like "We should delete all user accounts that haven't logged in 6 months", you say "Are you sure? some people will be upset. Some will post on twitter or reddit and complain etc" they confidently reply "Yes, we will explain that it's not sustainable and they are welcome to create another account". So you go ahead and implement that. 1 second after it goes into effect, you get angry support tickets, a post on twitter, and that "leader" immediately backpedals that "the implementation was not how I expected". Like what did you expect was gonna happen exactly?

I have a feeling the devs themselves aren't the issue and it probably sucks to have to be the fall guys (though some for sure might buy into all of Anthropic's schemes).

But my best guess is they don't want to put a firm line down because they want to be free to shift it around however they'd like.

The Keir Starmer of companies

Is it too much to ask for a not-vibe-coded billing system? In my opinion, we need better systems to hold these companies accountable as I don't believe the $20/dispute they're paying means much given how common other customers are complaining about billing irregularities just in this thread alone.

Did your account get banned, as everyone is saying? If so, did you make a new account, and did it get banned?

Seems to be a really common theme in this thread. I wonder if any journalists are watching. It would be an interesting story.

Sounds like somebody needs good numbers for IPO

Can you elaborate for those of us that spend less time on HN?

They're making their moves while everyone thinks ChatGPT is shite.

Trillion dollar company now. Technically still multi-billions but…yeah.

I'm not really sure what to do here. I refuse to give Altman money, but Anthropic keeps disappointing me over and over with crap like this. Gemini seems behind? Not touching Grok.

Meanwhile I've integrated CC into my workflow enough that I'd feel frustrated cutting out all LLM agent use.

I don't have the hardware to run models locally, and I'm not excited about the idea of spending that money. I could use a different harness with one of the services that runs open-weight models for me, but I feel like the cost would be prohibitive. I'm paying $100/mo right now and that's all I'm willing to spend.

If I had to guess, this is a continuation of Anthropic's ongoing war to make third party tool usage go through per-token billing, specifically against a tool called Hermes-agent [0]. You can easily imagine why Anthropic might want to silently re-bill a customer violating their silly ToS restrictions and how an LLM told to implement the feature might arrive at this "solution".

[0] https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

As the other person mentioned, they have said they are restricting third-party agent systems like OpenClaw and Hermes from using the monthly plan. But yeah, this seems like the wrong way to handle it, trying to detect those other harnesses via clues, and auto-changing billing. Instead, seems like it'd be better to allows vs block, like require some special encrypted signature system or similar that only Claude Code and their desktop app implement. Any other requests just get immediately blocked. Then there's a separate key for normal pay-by-the-token usage that is just unrestricted. Would make things waaaay clearer.

This case is so easy, a Chinese LLM lawyer would win against it

Another person claiming this.

Then you should consider alternative LLM API providers, who are not based in China but host the same (or roughly the same, depending on the quantization and other deployment specifics) models as your "Chinese AI services".

I saw this bug mentioned on Reddit a few days ago when it first got reported and someone said it was also triggered by certain file names used in OpenClaw.

I don't think it's as sinister as you're implying. I think it's part of them disallowing 3rd party clients from using Claude Code subscription and someone making a bad assumption that certain files in a repo being a good signal that someone is attempting to bypass those rules.

It's still not a good look for Anthropic, but I don't take this as a secret attempt to sabotage a competitor. I take it as them trying to enforce rules that they had very publicly announced.

I asked how to get a partial refund (it blew through my quota in a single question) and Claude sent me to Github.

It’s not a billing issue, it’s a bug that leads to the usage of the wrong quota

This is like cheat codes, except they make it harder.

Facebook has been like this for more than 10 year, and nothing was ever done.

As I read it, they didn't look up the account to process the refund. They looked up the account to decide whether to process the refund, and then the decision was "no".

The rest of the support response is just pleasantries and padding, to dance around this fact ("Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable" blah blah).

I'm not sure (I'm not in Anthropic, I'm not related to them, I'm just guessing), but I think that humans that worked on so-called "Mythos" (I'm sorry but I'm taking this one with a pinch of salt) and humans who work on/responsible for Claude Code, API and similar features are different humans. Completely different.

See also: privacy.com

(Virtual card provider that generates cards as a free-to-the-user service. They make their money from a cut of the standard transaction fees. Cards are locked to a single merchant and it’s easy to configure limits.)

It's actually rumoured to be part of HL3, which is why they had to block it because of their agreement with valve

Hermes was a model on hf from like 2 years ago, no idea what it means in current context.

Early in the issue thread, sasha-id posts the initial refund refusal by Anthropic (email, presumably) followed by a gif of Leonardo DiCaprio applauding in Wolf Of Wall Street.

He didn't quote the Anthropic response, leading to the impression that he was Anthropic staff, confusing you, me and "CollectionAgency" in the issue thread, among others, I assume.

They were replying to the bot autoreply.

Don't forget the employees doing the actual model training and research are not the same ones coding Claude Code. CC was a side-project by one employee that ended up hitting it big and is now one of the core parts of their income. They were never a software company per se. This is like how MidJourney was just on Discord forever, because no one on the team was a real web developer. Discord made it easy to get something out there, scale up to many users, etc.

Oh, no it was absolutely on purpose. Why else you'd have code that looks for a certain string in commit and does the reroute ?

Already way ahead of you. I never started so I consider myself a winner.

On other hand I wonder what other filenames one could include in their repos to cause this sort of behaviour. Kinda a nudge towards people leaving these tools.

I tried to switch to a competing inferencing platform but they have billing issues as well.

The only revolution that got started in beds successfully so far was the sexual one.

I'm in. What's next?