> 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.
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
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.
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.
"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."
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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
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.
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....
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.”
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 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.
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.
Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.
Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.
If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.
My guess is this response was entirely written by an LLM that is instructed to never to offer refunds or compensation.
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.
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.
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 $20M seems "insignificant" next to the however many billions they made in the quarter. Knowingly perpetuating fraudulent billing practises is a real legal risk with real prosecutorial (and financial) consequences. It's absurd to me that so much of legal risk analysis fixates on how users use the tools they pay for, but not what's an obvious trigger for class action lawsuits and prosecutorial investigations in most jurisdictions.
This isn't even a threat. The FTC has taken Uber to court, https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2... and is apparently seeking a few billion in fines?
https://www.independent.co.uk/us/money/uber-lawsuit-fines-bi...
Purposeful unauthorized billing was found to be a scam and defendants were made to fork over assets, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
And this is government action in one jurisdiction. The EU has fines of 6% of global turnover, and yes, they too will seize assets if the fines are unpaid.
What I'm trying to say politely is, does the Anthropic team realize this is an insane legal risk. And to quote Trevor Moore's immortal words, "insanely illegal."
Why would you do this? Does anyone realize the implications of this? At all? Other than the AI models that the humans aren't paying attention to?
screenshots for anyone interested, https://x.com/_areoform/status/2048644232043434354
Not sure I've ever seen a company openly take this position. This is a crazy policy.
And to get to that point, you need to be willing to spend a lot more than 200$.
A classic.
He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
Back in December the iOS app had a bug ( https://status.claude.com/incidents/6rrnsb1y0kbn) in which buying a subscription thru the Apple App Store would not register with the backend, so you’d be charged but not receive the plan entitlement.
I discovered this because I wanted to upgrade from free plan to the regular plan. I was charged, but remained in the free tier. Thinking it was a temporary bug, I tried buying the max plan. Same result.
I tried cancelling the plan and restarting but I when I went to buy the regular plan again, I was forever tagged as an “Apple” user and so could only manage the billing plan on the iOS app. I tried one more time, same result.
I tried interacting with the support bot and although it agreed that there was a bug and that it should be fixed and I should get a refund, my account never was able to get unstuck nor refunded. I lodged a refund request with Apple, which was relatively quickly refunded. The Bot never did escalate to a human as promised.
Even though the bug was ostensibly fixed, my account (personal email) remains in permanent limbo, unable to upgrade from Free to anything else (I tried again recently and same result - paid but stuck on free plan). I had to create a new gmail just to pay for Anthropic / Claude.
I should have denied the PayPal charge on my bank account, that always gets a real human to look into it. Lesson learned.
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.
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.
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.
In this particular case I think the authors reply is them quoting what support told them?
It was obvious to me, but I can see how somebody could get confused from that.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
given the information we have, this describes the current state.
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)
How about Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement for perhaps the biggest theft in history?
Weird how people forgot about that.
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 basically all of big tech.
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right" - Henry Ford
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 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.
He's getting a refund + $200 worth of credits
What a claude excuse
English is not my first language, so I might have misunderstood....
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).
you will do it again because you are an all-day sucker
I can’t believe they paid 100m for some of these employees. They could have bought entire companies of real developers.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.