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Anthropic bans orgs without warning

48 points by alpinisme ↗ HN
I work at at an agricultural technology company. On Monday, everyone in our org woke up to emails saying that their Claude accounts had been suspended (~70 users).

At first -- since the email was to me, with a link to a Google Form if I personally wanted to appeal -- I thought it must be an individualized ban (at least after deciding it wasn’t a phishing attempt). I couldn’t figure out why, but it set me searching my mind for possible triggers in my recent activity.

On Slack, though, it quickly became apparent this was actually an organization-wide ban. And none of us had been warned, including our account admins. We submitted the Google Form, but that was just a black hole. We’re waiting to hear back still a day and a half later.

But this is insane for a number of reasons:

1. Banning an organization for the behavior of an individual is a recipe for disaster in a business context. Disgruntled employees, incompetent interns -- anyone could maliciously or accidentally revoke Claude access for the whole business.

2. We didn’t just have a Claude Team plan, we also had an API account, which is paid for separately but had the same admins. The API account continues to allow us to use our API keys and sent us a renewal bill yesterday (after the Team account suspension). But none of our admins can actually view usage or billing, because our email addresses were banned.

3. Banning without warning makes every move dangerous. Was it because we had conversations about fertilizer? GPS satellites? other agriculture-related things? We can’t know and can’t avoid it.

We’ve reached out to Anthropic via a number of channels but have received only radio silence. There was a twitter thread about a similar issue (https://x.com/patomolina/status/2045281665363386504), and we tried DM’ing the Anthropic employee who chimed in there. Also no response. I’m sure if we wait long enough we’ll come to some form of resolution here, but you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business.

18 comments

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inquisitive-me
New attack vector just start asking chat bots questions that violate TOS and get the whole company banned.
alpinisme
Correction: my old number of 70 users was outdated. We actually have 110
codingdave
> you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business.

No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations. You can certainly use platforms and vendors in your day-to-day operations, but you always need a backup / business continuity plan because you never know when a vendor will flake out on you, for any variety of reasons.

It seems like many startups learn this lesson painfully, and most people who have been around the block a few times know it well. So I'm not certain why people are disregarding it when it comes to LLMs.

polack
In Anthropics defense they make sure that no company can rely on them by being down all the time... And LLMs have become a commodity these days, so you can seamlessly just fail over to another supplier WHEN they go down.
badpun
> No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations.

Most of companies in the world have done that with Windows, though.

tacostakohashi
So, what's new? I guess it used to be Paypal, then Google, and now it's Anthropic are randomly banning their customers.

For a multi-billion dollar megacorp, dealing/fixing things for individual customers is in the too-hard basket.

NikolaosC
Brutal. The silence is the worst part you can't fix what nobody will explain. Hope someone at Anthropic sees this and actually responds.
muzani
It takes 3 weeks to get past the AI customer service bot, assuming you ever do. Good luck.
mdrzn
Same, just had a Max ($200) account that I had for the last 10 months banned without explanation, which is weird since all I use it for is to code landing pages and write emails.
bkovacev
Same thing happened to us with OpenAI. Appeal did nothing.
alpinisme
Oh no! If you don’t mind, could you share some context on what you were using it for and at what scale?
bkovacev
I have used it for personal coding projects - expo react native projects and a Django backend. my account got banned, as the company owner non the less. My teammates were using it for the company projects (all coding through the codex app / vs code) and they were not banned.
julia-kafarska
Just guessing but IMO bans confirm the bubble. They subsidizing to gain customers while pro/max plan is reasonable, costs of tokens on their API is much higher. Moving it to on-prem might be future of AI.
taklimakan
The same thing happened to us too. Fresh company account, banned right away. Two weeks later we get an automated email stating that our appeal was reviewed but they could do nothing about that. I can’t even begin to describe how ridiculous this is.