> 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.

Hey everyone, Thariq from the Claude Code team.

We've been on this since the bug surfaced. Everyone affected is getting a full refund and an extra grant of usage credits equal to their monthly subscription as our apology. You can see my original post here: https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245. We’re still working on sending emails to everyone affected.

Our support flow wasn't set up to route a complex bug like this to engineering. We’re hoping to make this better but will take some time. Sorry to everyone caught up in it.

"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.

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.

https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245

He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.

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 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).

After i was triple billed in January, they acknowledged it but refused to provide a refund. I won those credit card disputes.

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.

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

I feel like it's not news that a company with (probably) millions of DAU is not able to handle a single case like this one.

At the same time, it's clear that after this happened, Anthropic took action. 3 DAYS AGO! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47954655)

That's before this comment was made on the issue:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...

I'm surprised Anthropic didn't also say this on the issue. Weird that they wouldn't. It seems to have made for unnecessary bad PR.

It feels to me that Anthropic is less focused on quality, and more focused on PR stunts/flash. My experience with Claude is always "it's pretty and feels cool", where-as codex feels like "solid and boring". I realize I'm probably biased. Am I alone in this thinking?

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.

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.

>Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.

This is the most interesting line to me. "Anti-abuse system"? I would bet the system is far from being just a conditional on a specific filename. In other words, this supposed anti-abuse system might be far more pervasive without the user's knowledge. And perhaps even more importantly, who thought upcharging instead of blocking is the correct approach to dealing with this alleged "abuse"? Is this some anti-distillation feature they let Claude itself write looking at past distillation attempts producing similar artifacts or what?

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

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."

https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245

He's getting a refund + $200 worth of credits

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 used to have the 20$ plan, upgraded to max, they were going to charge me 86$ for max minus pro plan.

Credit card didn’t get through, pro plan got insta cancelled, had to pay for full max plan. Clearly a billing bug on their side. If the credit card when upgrading a plan doesn’t come through, don’t destroy the existing plan.

I talked to the chat bot; i got a ticket number, a human will come back to me. That was three months ago. Never got refunded. Nobody emailed me.

I ended cancelling the max plan, it expired yesterday. This plus the constant degradation of the service despite having 30B revenue first quarter this year.

A company that has so much money, and cannot care less about their users…

They will have to do much better if they want to get me back.

Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"

They refused to refund me $200 when I had both a claude code subscription and the other thing. I had been using credits or something. Essentially double paying. And they just refused.

Pretty sure the last remaining human lawyers are preparing a class action as we speak.

I have worked on systems before that exhibited weird bugs like this before.

When you've been a Software Engineer for a while you start to be able to put bugs in certain buckets.

Then there is the last bucket, like the X-Files. They don't belong anywhere else. They have no specific reason. They happened because of a weird set of circumstances, usually due to too many developers working on the same product, without proper abstractions and separations.

And having spent too much time that I'd like working and reviewing code generated by AI, this is exactly what the AI does. It doesn't abstract. It doesn't separate. It just does what it is asked, not that different from the quality of code from outsourcing contractors.

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 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.)

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

Who knew one of the best AI companies in the world isn't using an AI to screen for these words.

There should have been a two layer approach:

1. Run regex to screen for target word

2. If positive, run the context through a cheap AI model

Tomorrow: We used all your data to train our latest mode, Mythos. That was a mistake. Now go away.

WJW. I can not believe Anthropic's response.

Just refuse to pay any bill from any vendor that by their own public admission) is a "incorrect bill".

This isn't just about PR and technicalities, this is Business 101.

Are there other undocumented codes Anthropic recognizes in Git commits?

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.

you knew they were snakes when you picked them up

you will do it again because you are an all-day sucker

Technical issue causing over billing? Mythos is going well I see

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....

> 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

If Mythos is so smart, how come Anthropic does dumb shit like this every week?

Damn, you vibe coders live like this?

Sounds like a vibe-coded feature if I ever heard of one

Goes to show how much consumer surplus you're getting for that $200/mo subscription...

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

So.. their billing system is using '$>claude | jq' somewhere?

The comment stream seems to point out they ARE getting refunded and its not refused.

Claude is running their accounting department

Yea AI is not going to be a net positive for humanity...

They acknowledged the bug. Screenshot and chargeback

Is Hermes the name of a new model? After Mythos?

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.

To be frank this kind of rep is what keeps me from getting a personal sub for Claude. I don't have an extra $200 to pay for someone else's bugs.

Anthropic will need to make sure that i am never charged beyond my subscription fees before I consider a sub.

Do a chargeback?

I am confused.

The person who created the PR is user "sasha-id".

The person saying no to the refund is also user "sasha-id".

What?

Where was it exactly thats someone from Anthropic said no to a refund request? I feel I am missing the obvious somehow.

He should use credit card chargeback.

I purchased a 12-month subscription for my partner, and Anthropic never delivered the gift to their email, only sent me an invoice.

No response from customer service.. only their AI Agent Support.. Which has still not offered me a refund.

I may have to do a chargeback.

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.

Waiting for customer service to make a comeback. It seems like SaaS is an infinite see of shitty chatbots doing a whole lot of brand damage. Basically for any service that I use, whenever I am forced to interact with a chatbot, that company takes a critical hit to its reputation going forward because the interaction is never anything but enraging.

> 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

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.

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...

Is it just me or did a fucking AI refuse to give a refund and then add a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio? Are there any actual adults with judgment left?

I wonder when Anthropic will give refunds for all the sessions with nerfed / dumbed down Opus.

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.

They just lost the Claude lottery, that’s all.

They're humanists. Haven't you seen those awesome chalk drawings outside their hq?

“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”

Another reason to avoid Anthropic products now.

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.

We need extra laws to punish companies that try to fend of human users with AI "support" bullshit.

Allow users to file a lawsuit against the company using AI against their customers and judge the company only on what the AI generated without a chance to add anything more in their defense. Also any boilerplate legalese the AIs will quote in reaction to such laws is null and void.

Suddenly every AI support channel will have an "escalate to human support" button.

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 ...

Google worked for tens of years to make people disgusted and hating them. Big AI companies succeeded in just a few years, so AI must be an accelerator.

"We're already losing literal fuck-tons of money by the minute, so we can't afford to refund you for our mistake."

Yet another reason i’m only interested in open source local models.

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.

C'mon folks, let's stop using Claude|ChatGPT|etc en masse. It's time to start the revolution (from our beds, at least)

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...