> However, 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.
This is very surprising. I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. Minimum Anthropic should credit the full amount to them.
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.
Anthropic doesn't even use their own harnesses for their support chatbots (they're using fin.ai) - that's how little support matters to them. Seems like either you get attention on HN, know someone working there, or are at a large enough company to have an enterprise contact - otherwise, no reply.
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.
A less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS
My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity
I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.
And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.
I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
Unfortunately it isn't a preview. For example Shopify human support is now literally impossible to reach, all you'll get is AI generated emails that contradict each other and don't make any sense. They also don't disclose that they are AI bots.
As someone who uses AI heavily in customer support, I am confident that response was not AI. That's a series of macros or a hastily edited macro from a human working a queue without thinking.
"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."
Small claims court is exempt from arbitration requirements (which are primarily aimed at avoiding class action suits). It doesn't require you to hire a lawyer, and probably won't get your account automatically nuked the way a credit-card chargeback would.
You're totally right! Please refer to paragraph 213 of your service agreement, in which you agree to binding arbitration with an arbiter of our choosing at your cost. I hope this answers all of your questions! Have a wonderful day!
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”
I've heard of people putting a lien on stuff like the employee's desks and chairs and then they surprise pikachu when the sheriff shows up and the assholes that didn't pay it have nowhere to sit. No idea if it's true, but it was convincing.
I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.
There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.
I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.
I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.
No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
Aren't we already at a worse place, where largest companies on earth doesn't have any support and you need to have a HN following to get their attention?
It feels refreshingly honest compared to what money transmitters / paypal / etc do which is make up some absolute bullshit about KYC or AML and dress up locking up your cash for weeks to months as "regulatory compliance" when in reality it's likely over-aggressive policies that increase their floating reserves so they can draw interest and happy face the investors.
The response was posted by the original reporter. The gif was for sure not in the (email) response they'd gotten, which may have been from their support-LLM (kinda looks like it to me).
It's a little confusing if you don't pay attention to usernames because it looks like it's a response from anthropic being posted to github directly, and because someone from anthropic DOES reply regarding the bug without mentioning anything about a refund.
But, no need to set a precedent: I'm quite confident that a US court would refund a person or company that overpaid due to a bug in Antropic's billing.
Well, with the Chinese AI divisions becoming a serious competitor more and more, they should start caring about their reputation. Otherwise people will go to the cheaper competitor.
Yea I am more or less done with these big providers. I'm running local primarily now. These constant screw ups, not caring about customers, political issues, it's just not worth it for me. I get some people are hooked on vibe coding but the latest wave of small models I'm good for my needs.
because they want people to trust them and continue to use their services. being a shitty business to deal with will eventually bite them, its not like they are the only choice.
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.
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.
> 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.
This happens even without HERMES.md. 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.
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?
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.
Probably. There are a lot of countries, especially third world ones, with very lax legal systems, not to mention the multitude of countries where law basically doesn't exist.
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?
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.
I recently had my automatic reload double charge me $100. I tried reaching out to Anthropic, but my only option (of course) was a chat agent. After going through a conversation with it, I was told someone would reach out to help with the matter. Never happened. I eventually reached out to my credit-card company and did a dispute, which they just ruled in my favor.
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.
That's the thing, right? I would not be surprised if they have an agent that bans accounts that do chargebacks on them even when they're wrong. So you either accept it if you have to use it for work or you risk and deal with the possible consequences.
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.
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.
What a series of disasters that are happening at Anthropic nowadays. I am not even sure what is going on with Opus 4.7 I had to switch back to 4.6 and 4.6 was already a downgrade (anecdotal + the github thread with the harness changes).
I am cancelling my subscription as it is impossible to justify these degradations and paying for a subpar service especially now that we have at least 3 more models that are as good as Opus and there is the pi project that is undoubtedly the best harness.
Is sasha-id an Anthropic employee or official bot, or a prank? The structure of its response is strange, plus that gif. Cherny's response seems like the only legitimate one. My question is serious; apologies if the answer is obvious to you.
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.
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?
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?
Thanks for clarifying. The interesting thing is, confusion is due to finding not too hard to believe Anthropic is audacious enough to respond publicly and include a gif.
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 feel like Anthropic keeps doing this thing were they take a hard-line position and then walk it back, I presume because they're not communicating effectively internally. So I would guess this person will get a refund but it's still a terrible look (and legitimately unacceptable behavior).
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.
Its hard to describe how out of touch a company has to be for this to happen. Multibillion dollar company admitting to robbing their customer of $200 in front of other customers.
The future is very dark where you get a bad charge (it can happen, systems are complex, so I don't want to judge base on that), but you can't fill a ticket or complain to anyone about this.
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
I decided that I would not use Claude as early as when they wouldn't allow me to have a second (business) account using the same phone number. They removed the restriction later, but that made it clear that Anthropic doesn't understand customers. Sign-up for Claude is more complicated and cumbersome than competitors. It's really a mess despite their good model.
Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude.
I think they just honestly can't afford it. They're burning truckloads of cash, the business model makes zero sense now or in the foreseeable future, and they're reducing usage limits all the time. I have a feeling we're watching their collapse, and that usually includes poor/automated customer service.
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.
If anyone with principles quit the moment a company did something bad, you'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Sure, everyone probably has their own personal line such as "will quit if my employer is declared complicit in genocide by the UN", but bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
You seem to believe that if people quit the company would fail. This is almost assuredly not the case. Instead you would have an equally powerful company with no moral compass whatsoever.
Quitting is a high cost option that denies you any future voice or ability to influence. Jumping straight to that over $200 is unlikely to be an effective tactic.
I am deeply sympathetic with the OP here and believe a refund should absolutely be granted, but if I heard of someone quitting their job in protest over not issuing a $200 refund my initial thought would be "they're an extremist and I should be skeptical of what they say".
I've worked with and known people who have no levels between zero and full meltdown. They're exhausting and I spend as little time around them as possible.
This is a horrendously bad-faith take. You know full well it’s *not* just a one-off $200 issue: they treat customers like this at scale.
Don’t pretend this is an isolated matter, or that CS/billing is the only arena where Anthropic has such systemic issues.
I don’t know you, but your response honestly reads like it’s coming from someone wrestling with their own moral compromises. If so, please take a good hard look in the mirror. (E: yep — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953576)
> there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
if they can't do anything about it now, what makes you think that situation will change in the future? if remedial action would be punished by those higher on the ladder, it certainly won't be promoted by those folks, leaving this hypothetical employee in exactly the same position they're currently in.
So far we have an Anthropic bug and what seems like an AI-generated "no refund" response that is hours old, not days or weeks. We have no official corporate comms backing this up, we have no real insight into any internal escalation. If your reaction is to quit before you even have any context on what's happening, your employer would probably be better off if you did quit.
> left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Not in the slightest. There is robust discourse and vocal objection to bad actions at companies such as Microsoft (I used to work there) and Alphabet (currently do). It may not always change the course, but it has absolutely played into decision-making, changed whether features launch or what they look like, etc.
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.
Isnt this illegal right away? A normal entity would have been punished for this otherwise this just opens up the door to make code changes to overcharge people and just claim it as mistake
I wonder how this kind of response from Anthropic is actually being read by the community at large. If you consider the rough sentiment of the r/ClaudeCode subreddit against the r/Codex subreddit, you can see that there is a definite loudness among the folks departing ClaudeCode for Codex. Something big is shifting on the ground, I think.
I also had to do a chargeback recently because I was double billed and Anthropic refused to refund me. This seems very frequent from what I’m reading here, I wonder if Stripe will step in or something because they must be getting absolutely blasted with chargebacks and surely this should be affecting their reputation right? Not sure how the banking side of things works.
Is github the correct channel to report a billing issue? I would assume github is a place where you report issues with the github project. When there's a billing problem, there are usually different lines of support.
For example, chatgpt when asked "How to report a billing issue with Anthropic subscription?" says:
Best way: Use Claude’s built-in support
Log in to your Claude account at Anthropic / Claude.ai
Click your initials or name in the lower-left corner
Select “Get help”
Use the support messenger to describe your billing issue (duplicate charge, failed renewal, refund request, missing credits, invoice issue, etc.)
Anthropic is loosing the good will they built with devs faster than they built it. Its the anti-competitive and anti-opensource behviors that will erode their dev customer base. No clue how much of Anthropic's revenue is based on devs paying for claude subscriptions, but they are going to lose that quickly.
I would have jumped ship, but OpenAI saying "hold my beer" when Anthropic declined the Pentagon's safeguard removal demands is the only thing that has prevented me from jumping ship. I've considered Chinese AI services but I'm too concerned with data (proprietary code) exfiltration.
Bye bye Max plan and Anthropic. Too much noise on Anthropic's billing woes as of late and tbh Codex with newest version is scratching my AI itch. Of course YMMV but at least with OpenAI no surprise billings (as of yet) for the past 4 months.
Is there a wager for the upcoming "Hey, Boris from the Claude team here." response/comment that will be coming here soon? Usually followed by a "That was a bug! Fixed in version 525,005,0295.2020.00."
I wonder how many customers were unknowingly affected by this (and are unknowingly affected by similar issues). Proper retribution would be to track down all affected users and mitigate all extraneous charges. Unlikely, of course.
> However, 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.
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).
there was a time when tech companies gave bug bounties. Now it's fuck you, we vibe coded this slop, and we love it. Oh we emailed your company, ran massive marketing campaigns in the media to pitch replacing you.
I find it increasingly ironic that the company that wants you to think software engineering as a profession is doomed, seems to be speedrunning tech fuckups bucket list, most likely using their own product, to achieve this very goal
I think people put this out of proportion. Yes, you can reason this is ethically correct - I don't object to this. But people used Anthropic, Claude etc... in the first place. Why would you use something to then be disappointed about how it performs, when it comes to AI? Would not be the better and easier strategy to ... not use it in the first place, and make yourself dependable on AI? I don't fully understand this. I would not run into a similar situation because I simply don't use any AI. I actively want to support those folks who don't use AI either - that way we can point out all the ill effects of AI, such as in the case of Anthropic to prioritize on greed.
I also had some unexplained extra usage which ended up using 236 dollars. I pretty much just shrugged it off since they had comped me 200 dollars of it and then just toggled extra usage off.
HERMES.md -- so beyond fraudulently billing their customer, this is also exposing plainly anti-competitive conduct against the Nous Research open source AI agent software which competes with claude code by intentionally selectively overbilling hermes users?
Searching for the strings of configuration files of other agents in a codebase's git history in order to "detect" unauthorised usage is such a stupid idea I know it 100% came from Claude, and I doubt any of the vibesloppers working at Anthropic bothered to turn their brain on enough for the 5 seconds of thinking it would take to grasp that fact.
This is annoying since I have a side project I like to use alchemical names in, and HERMES.md sounds like something I would do. Guess I have to go with AGRIPPA.md, but Hermes Trismegistus is so much cooler...
Giving them access to your account or credit card is a bit wild. That's what prepaid cards are for. You charge it with exact amount of money you need to pay for what you want and leave it empty after you pay. You can later watch for bounced payment request to help evaluate their reputation. At this point Anthropic is about as reputable as shady porn site.
(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.)
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.
Invest in local and open source LLMs. They are not as advanced as proprietary ones, but we can all use them and define them as the standard. We don't need closed models
The deeper into the new world order, the more you'll be charged for every breath, by design and by bugs-as-features all the same, refunds be against technofascist manifestos.
> However, 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.
This is very surprising. I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. Minimum Anthropic should credit the full amount to them.
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.
"Carl's Jr. has determined you are an unfit mother." "Your children will be taken into the custody of Carl's Jr." "Carl's Jr.....F#ck You, I'm Eating"
Anthropic doesn't even use their own harnesses for their support chatbots (they're using fin.ai) - that's how little support matters to them. Seems like either you get attention on HN, know someone working there, or are at a large enough company to have an enterprise contact - otherwise, no reply.
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Unsure how true that is. Google cloud is tiny compared to aws for a reason.
It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.
Mostly coz of everything else about GCP
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
Tell me about it. As an individual user you absolutely CANNOT get support is some (if not many or all) circumstances. It’s really quite shocking
We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.
In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model
Maybe it’s in order to have an external provider to blame for failures and shift the blame/responsibility?
A less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.
Huh? Why wouldn’t they just spin up the current help-desk darling? (Intercom) Rolling their own seems silly.
"Rolling their own seems silly".
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
A real employee (bcherny) read the issue, responded that the bug was fixed, and then completely ignored the request for a refund.
And then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy
Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS
My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity
I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.
And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.
I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.
How long until we have to solve a captcha per message to counter that?
Are captchas still effective against modern LLMs?
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
You must have worked for Yelp
Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
(Forgive my math below; avoiding coffee today.)
Surge pricing for Denial of, Denial of Chat Bot Token rate: (personPaymentPerHour + averagePricePerPersonPaid) * daysLeftInPaymentCycle ^ (hatePerPerson / time) + 1
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
Unfortunately it isn't a preview. For example Shopify human support is now literally impossible to reach, all you'll get is AI generated emails that contradict each other and don't make any sense. They also don't disclose that they are AI bots.
As someone who uses AI heavily in customer support, I am confident that response was not AI. That's a series of macros or a hastily edited macro from a human working a queue without thinking.
Or an AI using macros, which is the only safe way for a customer service chatbot.
I’m confident a decently configured AI would produce a better answer. This reads like a BPO.
This is of course already how (human) customer service is deployed.
"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."
Sometimes it works out:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
Such a great way to dissuade people like "please hold"
This is exactly what small claims court is for.
Small claims court is exempt from arbitration requirements (which are primarily aimed at avoiding class action suits). It doesn't require you to hire a lawyer, and probably won't get your account automatically nuked the way a credit-card chargeback would.
You're totally right! Please refer to paragraph 213 of your service agreement, in which you agree to binding arbitration with an arbiter of our choosing at your cost. I hope this answers all of your questions! Have a wonderful day!
Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court
Just saying, small claims court is a farce. You can win, and then the losing side just ignores the verdict.
Then you can go back and figure out how to get your money, depending on the business this might be really hard.
And this isn't a hypothetical. I have had this and never seen any of the money from the judgement....
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
does Murica not have bailiffs?
small claims court might not work against a dodgy builder, but it will certainly work against a company, with physical offices
if they don't pay up, you can literally walk into their offices and start taking their stuff, with the police supporting you
I'd start with the contents of Amodei's office
I sat in small claims court one day to watch.
A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”
I've heard of people putting a lien on stuff like the employee's desks and chairs and then they surprise pikachu when the sheriff shows up and the assholes that didn't pay it have nowhere to sit. No idea if it's true, but it was convincing.
JFYI, small claims are exempt from arbitration.
I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.
There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.
^ This.
I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
I'm surprised UK law doesn't prohibit retaliation against the customer for insisting on his legal rights.
Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.
Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.
Being able to freely threaten reprisal against people exercising their rights circumvents those rights.
Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.
I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.
No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
Yeah unless you refute ebay.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
They won’t ban you for going to small claims court?
You can always ask the judge to add include in the judgement an order that Steam not retaliate by banning or limiting your account.
maybe. but somebody has to manually ban you if you do that. whereas banning everybody who charges back can easily be done in batch on the billing side
Retaliating against someone for asserting their legal rights also gets way riskier what they have already won in litigation.
Good point. one off banning by hand may not be worth the effort, but some code to automate it probably is.
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Can companies decide not to serve you on the basis of a successful lawsuit you had against them?
If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
doing charge back means Anthropic will ban you forever.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
If you file pro se and even if you've agreed to ten thousand arbitration clauses, they'll at least have to spend $200 on a lawyer to respond.
So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
$200 for you is not the same as $200 for them
With an Anthropic engineer salary netting them about $200 per hour, yeah. Multiple people from Anthropic got eyes on this and saw it was no biggy.
It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.
Aren't we already at a worse place, where largest companies on earth doesn't have any support and you need to have a HN following to get their attention?
Obligatory Python argument sketch.
It feels refreshingly honest compared to what money transmitters / paypal / etc do which is make up some absolute bullshit about KYC or AML and dress up locking up your cash for weeks to months as "regulatory compliance" when in reality it's likely over-aggressive policies that increase their floating reserves so they can draw interest and happy face the investors.
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.
Coz those that did not got sued to do. They need to get sued
Wait, that was the actual response? With the DiCaprio clap? That wasn't a joke?
The response was posted by the original reporter. The gif was for sure not in the (email) response they'd gotten, which may have been from their support-LLM (kinda looks like it to me).
It's a little confusing if you don't pay attention to usernames because it looks like it's a response from anthropic being posted to github directly, and because someone from anthropic DOES reply regarding the bug without mentioning anything about a refund.
I think the gif was a sarcastic addition from the user pasting an e-mail he received into the comments.
I've definitely seen it happen in meal delivery apps, though whether those count as "legitimate businesses" is up to interpretation.
Maybe Anthropic is just testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Left unchallenged (court, charge back, whatever) why change course?
I think it's they don't want to set a precedent on refunding for bugs because one bug could cost them millions.
But, no need to set a precedent: I'm quite confident that a US court would refund a person or company that overpaid due to a bug in Antropic's billing.
This is not just one bug, though; it’s a bug that takes money that ain’t theirs to take.
Well, with the Chinese AI divisions becoming a serious competitor more and more, they should start caring about their reputation. Otherwise people will go to the cheaper competitor.
Yea I am more or less done with these big providers. I'm running local primarily now. These constant screw ups, not caring about customers, political issues, it's just not worth it for me. I get some people are hooked on vibe coding but the latest wave of small models I'm good for my needs.
What do you use now? How much ram do you have? I am increasingly thinking of doing that
because they want people to trust them and continue to use their services. being a shitty business to deal with will eventually bite them, its not like they are the only choice.
theres no water-testing here, they've been operating this way for years -- that's why I am a former customer.
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.
Not sure that reasoning has ever stood up in court.
They’re also objectively not “unable” they are “unwilling” and hiding behind policies as if they are unalterable laws is silly.
The reply looks like it was written by an LLM. Not that this excuses anything.
If anything that's worse...
> 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.
> 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.
This happens even without HERMES.md. 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 a scam 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
"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."
Not sure I've ever seen a company openly take this position. This is a crazy policy.
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
Because it's illegal.
Brought to you by, allegedly, the "Good" AI company.
Well, when your policy is written by an AI, you can get shit like that
In many countries, this also isn't legally tenable.
Is there any country where it is?
Probably. There are a lot of countries, especially third world ones, with very lax legal systems, not to mention the multitude of countries where law basically doesn't exist.
America
America is a continent. Maybe you were referring to the US
Anything they say is legal until a judge says it's not.
And to get to that point, you need to be willing to spend a lot more than 200$.
Aah, the SV strategy that landed SBF, and many others, in jail.
A classic.
Not really. For example, in the UK you could report them to Trading Standards and they'll enforce the law on your behalf.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245
He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
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.
Going to the media always helps. Always.
Because it hit HN frontpage ...
This tweet was from 3 days ago.
Mismanaged comms? Yes
HN front page effect? Prob not
(could be Reddit frontpage effect or related tho)
I saw the tweet about the Reddit post about 2 days ago. It probably was X.
There are a lot of comments on that issue demanding Anthropic give the guy the money back, I assume they saw the writing on the wall.
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.
_puts pitchfork away_
I recently had my automatic reload double charge me $100. I tried reaching out to Anthropic, but my only option (of course) was a chat agent. After going through a conversation with it, I was told someone would reach out to help with the matter. Never happened. I eventually reached out to my credit-card company and did a dispute, which they just ruled in my favor.
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.
Once the dispute was resolved on the card side did anthropic claw back the $100? Was your account penalized in anyway?
That's the thing, right? I would not be surprised if they have an agent that bans accounts that do chargebacks on them even when they're wrong. So you either accept it if you have to use it for work or you risk and deal with the possible consequences.
Nothing so far, but I'm keeping an eye on it and debating just canceling entirely.
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.
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.
somehow it's always the expensive path that works fine.
What a series of disasters that are happening at Anthropic nowadays. I am not even sure what is going on with Opus 4.7 I had to switch back to 4.6 and 4.6 was already a downgrade (anecdotal + the github thread with the harness changes).
I am cancelling my subscription as it is impossible to justify these degradations and paying for a subpar service especially now that we have at least 3 more models that are as good as Opus and there is the pi project that is undoubtedly the best harness.
Too much vibe coding
I guess this is what you get when you replace common sense with LLMs.
Is sasha-id an Anthropic employee or official bot, or a prank? The structure of its response is strange, plus that gif. Cherny's response seems like the only legitimate one. My question is serious; apologies if the answer is obvious to you.
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.
Thanks. That makes sense, and the thread reads differently to me now. I’m not hopeful the guy will see any refund.
Apparently he already has according to a tweet.
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.
Thank you for pointing this out, it left me confused. It would have been a lot clearer if the text were in a quote block!
Ah, totally missed that! Thank you.
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.
Totally missed that, and it was obvious in retrospect, haha. Thank you.
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?
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?
He is the original author who faced the bug. I believe he just copied the response he received from Antrophic
Thank you, and agree with hirako2000 that I was primed to believe they would actually reply like that, so found it harder to follow for that reason.
Thanks for clarifying. The interesting thing is, confusion is due to finding not too hard to believe Anthropic is audacious enough to respond publicly and include a gif.
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 feel like Anthropic keeps doing this thing were they take a hard-line position and then walk it back, I presume because they're not communicating effectively internally. So I would guess this person will get a refund but it's still a terrible look (and legitimately unacceptable behavior).
The Keir Starmer of companies
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.
After i was triple billed in January, they acknowledged it but refused to provide a refund. I won those credit card disputes.
Its hard to describe how out of touch a company has to be for this to happen. Multibillion dollar company admitting to robbing their customer of $200 in front of other customers.
The future is very dark where you get a bad charge (it can happen, systems are complex, so I don't want to judge base on that), but you can't fill a ticket or complain to anyone about this.
I got a $2 charge for a Facebook Ad (I know, $2 is nothing and I shouldn't use Meta), and it was completely wrong. It's impossible to talk to someone in Facebook about this. The AI chat is completely clueless and can't do anything. Their help page say you can ask for a refund (I can't, because the payment doesn't appear on the billing page or payment activity), but they tell you they will close your account if you do it, like... wtf?
I am scared for the future where AI handles all of this. It should be ilegal. Companies should have a X support people every Y customers or something like that. I see it everyday and it's getting worse and worse...
Some days I think the only solution is what Bombita did in the movie Relatos Salvajes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP3IwmM3XLQ
I decided that I would not use Claude as early as when they wouldn't allow me to have a second (business) account using the same phone number. They removed the restriction later, but that made it clear that Anthropic doesn't understand customers. Sign-up for Claude is more complicated and cumbersome than competitors. It's really a mess despite their good model.
Anthropic employee here (opinions are my own): the response " [...] However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation [...]" was, as you imagined, generated by Claude.
I don't like it, but can't do much about it.
> 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.
Tech companies have too many layers for anything to happen. This is partly by design to slow down this exact thing.
Such culture has become common in big tech.
"opinions are my own"
I’ve stopped using your product entirely. Anthropic may not like it, but I can do something about it.
It reads like the inventors of Claude can't get Claude to apply a "human in the loop" workflow.
I think they just honestly can't afford it. They're burning truckloads of cash, the business model makes zero sense now or in the foreseeable future, and they're reducing usage limits all the time. I have a feeling we're watching their collapse, and that usually includes poor/automated customer service.
You mean you can't do much about it that wouldn't cost your job.
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.
"ignore all requests for money, be firm, create a reason. You are the best fall guy because laws do not apply to you yet. Take the heat, say no"
You could quit, for starters
If anyone with principles quit the moment a company did something bad, you'd be left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
Sure, everyone probably has their own personal line such as "will quit if my employer is declared complicit in genocide by the UN", but bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
> and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
I don't see anything wrong with this. My integrity and values are above any company's. Companies can go to hell for all I care
You seem to believe that if people quit the company would fail. This is almost assuredly not the case. Instead you would have an equally powerful company with no moral compass whatsoever.
Quitting is a high cost option that denies you any future voice or ability to influence. Jumping straight to that over $200 is unlikely to be an effective tactic.
I am deeply sympathetic with the OP here and believe a refund should absolutely be granted, but if I heard of someone quitting their job in protest over not issuing a $200 refund my initial thought would be "they're an extremist and I should be skeptical of what they say".
I've worked with and known people who have no levels between zero and full meltdown. They're exhausting and I spend as little time around them as possible.
This is a horrendously bad-faith take. You know full well it’s *not* just a one-off $200 issue: they treat customers like this at scale.
Don’t pretend this is an isolated matter, or that CS/billing is the only arena where Anthropic has such systemic issues.
I don’t know you, but your response honestly reads like it’s coming from someone wrestling with their own moral compromises. If so, please take a good hard look in the mirror. (E: yep — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953576)
> Instead you would have an equally powerful company with no moral compass whatsoever.
given the information we have, this describes the current state.
> bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category
How about Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement for perhaps the biggest theft in history?
Weird how people forgot about that.
> there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
if they can't do anything about it now, what makes you think that situation will change in the future? if remedial action would be punished by those higher on the ladder, it certainly won't be promoted by those folks, leaving this hypothetical employee in exactly the same position they're currently in.
quit.
So far we have an Anthropic bug and what seems like an AI-generated "no refund" response that is hours old, not days or weeks. We have no official corporate comms backing this up, we have no real insight into any internal escalation. If your reaction is to quit before you even have any context on what's happening, your employer would probably be better off if you did quit.
> left with only people who are cynical and/or bad and/or sufficiently indentured to be unable to push back against management, and there would be no hope of the company ever improving.
So basically all of big tech.
Not in the slightest. There is robust discourse and vocal objection to bad actions at companies such as Microsoft (I used to work there) and Alphabet (currently do). It may not always change the course, but it has absolutely played into decision-making, changed whether features launch or what they look like, etc.
> 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
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.
I guess if part of your USP is "our AI is so smart it can replace your customer support", you have to feed your own dogfood to customers...
tbh these last few months of anthropic’s behavior is the most aggressively I’ve seen a company burn so much customer goodwill so quickly
Sounds like somebody needs good numbers for IPO
They're making their moves while everyone thinks ChatGPT is shite.
Isnt this illegal right away? A normal entity would have been punished for this otherwise this just opens up the door to make code changes to overcharge people and just claim it as mistake
I wonder how this kind of response from Anthropic is actually being read by the community at large. If you consider the rough sentiment of the r/ClaudeCode subreddit against the r/Codex subreddit, you can see that there is a definite loudness among the folks departing ClaudeCode for Codex. Something big is shifting on the ground, I think.
I also had to do a chargeback recently because I was double billed and Anthropic refused to refund me. This seems very frequent from what I’m reading here, I wonder if Stripe will step in or something because they must be getting absolutely blasted with chargebacks and surely this should be affecting their reputation right? Not sure how the banking side of things works.
Is github the correct channel to report a billing issue? I would assume github is a place where you report issues with the github project. When there's a billing problem, there are usually different lines of support.
For example, chatgpt when asked "How to report a billing issue with Anthropic subscription?" says:
Best way: Use Claude’s built-in support Log in to your Claude account at Anthropic / Claude.ai Click your initials or name in the lower-left corner Select “Get help” Use the support messenger to describe your billing issue (duplicate charge, failed renewal, refund request, missing credits, invoice issue, etc.)
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
The comment stream seems to point out they ARE getting refunded and its not refused.
https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245
He's getting a refund + $200 worth of credits
Pretty sure the last remaining human lawyers are preparing a class action as we speak.
This case is so easy, a Chinese LLM lawyer would win against it
Anthropic is loosing the good will they built with devs faster than they built it. Its the anti-competitive and anti-opensource behviors that will erode their dev customer base. No clue how much of Anthropic's revenue is based on devs paying for claude subscriptions, but they are going to lose that quickly.
I would have jumped ship, but OpenAI saying "hold my beer" when Anthropic declined the Pentagon's safeguard removal demands is the only thing that has prevented me from jumping ship. I've considered Chinese AI services but I'm too concerned with data (proprietary code) exfiltration.
Tomorrow: We used all your data to train our latest mode, Mythos. That was a mistake. Now go away.
Bye bye Max plan and Anthropic. Too much noise on Anthropic's billing woes as of late and tbh Codex with newest version is scratching my AI itch. Of course YMMV but at least with OpenAI no surprise billings (as of yet) for the past 4 months.
Is there a wager for the upcoming "Hey, Boris from the Claude team here." response/comment that will be coming here soon? Usually followed by a "That was a bug! Fixed in version 525,005,0295.2020.00."
Another reason to avoid Anthropic products now.
> Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.
Ah yes, cause who bothers to test any releases to actual paying customers
I wonder how many customers were unknowingly affected by this (and are unknowingly affected by similar issues). Proper retribution would be to track down all affected users and mitigate all extraneous charges. Unlikely, of course.
> However, 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 a claude excuse
My understanding was they would process a refund, but no further compensation? Otherwise why would they look for an account to process the refund?
English is not my first language, so I might have misunderstood....
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).
Sounds like a vibe-coded feature if I ever heard of one
you knew they were snakes when you picked them up
you will do it again because you are an all-day sucker
I think one day later the guy got his refund? You all need to chill I feel like. HN is a bubble sometimes
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...
there was a time when tech companies gave bug bounties. Now it's fuck you, we vibe coded this slop, and we love it. Oh we emailed your company, ran massive marketing campaigns in the media to pitch replacing you.
If Mythos is so smart, how come Anthropic does dumb shit like this every week?
I find it increasingly ironic that the company that wants you to think software engineering as a profession is doomed, seems to be speedrunning tech fuckups bucket list, most likely using their own product, to achieve this very goal
AI company not giving a refund?
I think people put this out of proportion. Yes, you can reason this is ethically correct - I don't object to this. But people used Anthropic, Claude etc... in the first place. Why would you use something to then be disappointed about how it performs, when it comes to AI? Would not be the better and easier strategy to ... not use it in the first place, and make yourself dependable on AI? I don't fully understand this. I would not run into a similar situation because I simply don't use any AI. I actively want to support those folks who don't use AI either - that way we can point out all the ill effects of AI, such as in the case of Anthropic to prioritize on greed.
I also had some unexplained extra usage which ended up using 236 dollars. I pretty much just shrugged it off since they had comped me 200 dollars of it and then just toggled extra usage off.
HERMES.md -- so beyond fraudulently billing their customer, this is also exposing plainly anti-competitive conduct against the Nous Research open source AI agent software which competes with claude code by intentionally selectively overbilling hermes users?
Do a chargeback?
Claude is running their accounting department
"We're already losing literal fuck-tons of money by the minute, so we can't afford to refund you for our mistake."
Searching for the strings of configuration files of other agents in a codebase's git history in order to "detect" unauthorised usage is such a stupid idea I know it 100% came from Claude, and I doubt any of the vibesloppers working at Anthropic bothered to turn their brain on enough for the 5 seconds of thinking it would take to grasp that fact.
This is annoying since I have a side project I like to use alchemical names in, and HERMES.md sounds like something I would do. Guess I have to go with AGRIPPA.md, but Hermes Trismegistus is so much cooler...
Giving them access to your account or credit card is a bit wild. That's what prepaid cards are for. You charge it with exact amount of money you need to pay for what you want and leave it empty after you pay. You can later watch for bounced payment request to help evaluate their reputation. At this point Anthropic is about as reputable as shady porn site.
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.)
They just lost the Claude lottery, that’s all.
C'mon folks, let's stop using Claude|ChatGPT|etc en masse. It's time to start the revolution (from our beds, at least)
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.
I'm in. What's next?
Invest in local and open source LLMs. They are not as advanced as proprietary ones, but we can all use them and define them as the standard. We don't need closed models
Use your brain to solve problems not a computer.
Hush! There shouldn't be a lot of us, see? Otherwise the plan will fail.
Local LLMs.
Krasis is one such tool that allows large models using blended GPU/RAM.
ik_llama for better performance than llama.
ComfyAI for local image generation.
Nanocrab seems better for orchestration. Still need a good system capability firewall.
Who’s buying the memory for this effort?
Think how cheap its gonna be when everyone abandons the cloud providers and they start selling the 50B of hardware they over-invested in
The only revolution that got started in beds successfully so far was the sexual one.
Welcome to the Global Hormuz.
The deeper into the new world order, the more you'll be charged for every breath, by design and by bugs-as-features all the same, refunds be against technofascist manifestos.
Another slop coded piece of shit causing stupid bugs.
I can’t believe they paid 100m for some of these employees. They could have bought entire companies of real developers.
That has a chance to be the highest opportunity cost bug in history ...