r/claude • • Aug 04 '26

Question I woke this morning and found out Anthropic started stealing my money.

Post image
1.6k Upvotes

I have usage credits off so there should not be any additional payments. When my monthly usage is full - the work stops. Anyone else had these kind of issues?

I'm trying to contact a human support - AI chat was useless. Chat's response:

"Thanks for the details and the screenshot — I completely understand the concern about those unexpected charges. Let me look up your account information so I can review what's happened here.

Fin AI Agent • AI Agent • 14m

Seen • 14m

I'm really sorry for the disruption and frustration this has caused. We take service reliability very seriously, and I want to be upfront with you: we're unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical/billing errors of this nature.

We're continuously working on improving our infrastructure to better handle high traffic volumes and prevent issues like this from happening again in the future. Thank you so much for your patience and understanding."

...

"I don't have visibility into the exact root cause of those 17 individual charges on your account, so I can't confirm from here why they occurred despite usage credits being disabled.

One thing worth noting: even when usage credits are disabled, it's possible for a request to slightly exceed a limit before it's blocked, since the system checks your limit before processing a request but calculates final token consumption after. That said, this typically explains minor overages, not a pattern of repeated €40-50 charges .

Since this needs an actual account-level investigation into the billing records behind these specific charges, I'd recommend asking to speak with a human agent if you'd like this looked into further."

"we're unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical/billing errors of this nature."

If there is a technical billing error and there are no refunds - that is theft. If I don't get my stolen money back, my subscription is over. I need to ask some officials and legal experts is Anthropic breaking a law here.

EDIT: Most likely this is caused by malware or hacker type situation. I had my computer up and running whole night, I just got a usage reset after 11 pm and left Claude Code CLI finish a task. Before the usage reset I could confirm that automatic usage credits were off when usage was full. I had been logged in to claude.ai as well.

Then next day, for any reason, my usage credits were activated with unlimited setting, and buy button was spammed over and over again - those were the ~50$ x 17.

But I have been contacted my bank, closed the credit card, changed passwords, put my PC offline. I'm sure I can sort this out with my bank.

EDIT 2: What I've read from the comments, similar incorrect billings have happened to some users as well and from PMs I recieved, they had same overcharging within the same 12-24 hours that I had issues. So there is a possibility of some kind of bug. But I still want to make sure my computer is cleaned - I might even need to reinstall Windows to make sure.

EDIT 3: Good news, the bank returned my lost money. We'll see will Anthropic ban my account for this, I don't know. I also wanted to dig thru the logs and try to find out what happened 3-4th August. I asked Opus and Fable to search thru all the local files and logs they can find and write a report. I think this was facinating. I think I'll just paste it here as it was. Of course the logs can't explain was there any usage credits turned on at that day but you can read that there were "usage full" moments and I waited those as always. So no credits were used. Also the 3.8 day was long, but a moderate day compaired to any other. So that does NOT explain extra usage. Here is the full novel that Opus/Fable wrote:

Claude Code Log Analysis — 3–5 August 2026

Independently fact-checked against the raw data. This report states only what the local Claude Code artifacts record, what follows from them, and what does not. It contains no hypotheses about causes outside those records.

1. Scope, method, and limits

Sources, all on the user's Windows machine:

Artifact Content
~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl Complete per-session transcripts (694 files), including sub-agent logs
~/.claude/history.jsonl Typed-input history; suppresses an entry identical to the one immediately preceding
~/.claude.json, ~/.claude/settings.json Client configuration and server-fetched account state
~/.claude/.credentials.json Credential metadata (field names and non-secret values only)
~/.local/bin/claude.exe.old.1786032556560 The CLI binary as installed during the period; mtime 4 Aug 03:39

Times are Europe/Helsinki (UTC+3) unless a raw UTC timestamp is quoted. Project-confidential work is described generically.

Token accounting. Streaming writes each assistant message to the transcript repeatedly; the input/cache fields stay constant across duplicates while output_tokens grows. Verified across all 799 duplicated message IDs on 3–4 August (constant fields varied in 0 groups; output_tokens never decreased). Totals therefore take the maximum output_tokens per message ID and the constant fields once. Four zero-usage <synthetic> records (client-generated limit notices) are excluded.

Scope limit that governs the whole report. These files record Claude Code activity on this machine only. Usage quota is account-wide: activity from any other client — claude.ai in a browser, mobile, another computer — consumes the same limits and appears nowhere in these files. Nothing here can confirm or exclude it.

2. What the cost figures mean

The USD figures are API list-price equivalents computed from transcript usage fields. They measure volume of work in a comparable unit — they are not amounts billed or owed. The account is a Max subscription (rateLimitTier: "default_claude_max_5x"), a flat monthly fee. Work is metered against five-hour and weekly limits, not a dollar balance — confirmed by the server-returned utilization block, where every *_dollars field is null. Read a "$-equivalent day" as a volume of work covered by the flat fee, not a charge.

3. Unified timeline, 3–5 August

All events below are read directly from the transcripts and history file. Session IDs, model changes, limit messages, and gaps are interleaved in one chronology so working blocks and breaks are visible at a glance.

3 August — the working day

Time Event Duration
07:41–08:56 Work (session ef968419). Model set to Opus 5 (1M context, high effort) at 08:13. 1 h 15 min
08:56–09:09 Gap 13 min
09:09–13:57 Work (sessions 9680b82f, 593dd190; a 1-minute session e61603eb at 13:10 ran alongside). 4 h 48 min
13:57–14:57 Gap 1 h 00 min
14:57–19:08 Work (sessions 27a05666, then 80c0a56a from 17:20). Model set to Fable 5 (medium effort) at 17:20. The heaviest hour of the whole period was 18:00–19:00, immediately before the limit hit. 4 h 11 min
19:08 Session-limit hit — "You've hit your session limit · resets 10:50pm". Work stops. —
19:08–22:50 Blocked by the limit. At 21:51 the operator typed "usage tuli täyteen ja nyt resetoitunut. Jatka mistä jäit." ("usage was full and now has been reset. Continue where you left off.") and received the same limit message — the reset had not yet occurred. 3 h 42 min
22:50–23:17 Limit reset (as announced); no request sent yet. 27 min
23:17–00:13 (4 Aug) Work resumes. The operator retyped the byte-identical prompt at 23:17 and work ran to 00:13 (session 02b5a53c from 23:29). The 23:17 prompt is absent from history.jsonl because consecutive identical entries are suppressed there; it is present in the session transcript. The suppression rule was verified against a counter-example (the string appears three times non-adjacently on 3 Aug). 56 min

Total break between the limit hit and resumed work: 4 h 09 min (3 h 42 min enforced + 27 min before the retry). Work performed: nine daytime hours in three blocks, plus the 56-minute evening block. Content of the day: documentation maintenance, a scoped quick-fix workflow, a debugging workflow, a user-acceptance verification round, and a planning and execution run.

Overnight 4 August — no activity

A scan of every transcript across all projects for 00:13 → 09:43 returns exactly one record: the closing system line of the session that ended at 00:13. No session ran on this machine for 9.5 hours and no billable tokens were generated. The only other filesystem event in the window is the CLI binary being rewritten at 03:39 — the client's own auto-update, preserved as claude.exe.old.1786032556560. It is not evidence of user activity.

4 August — two rejected attempts, no work

Time Event
09:43 Session opens; model set to Opus 5 (1M context, medium effort). First request rejected: "You've hit your session limit · resets 2pm". No work performed.
12:16–12:17 Second attempt; same rejection. No work performed.
after 12:17 No further activity that day.

4 August contributes zero billable tokens. The only two usage records that day are synthetic zero-usage limit notices at 09:43 and 12:17.

5 August — nothing

One command in the entire day: /usage at 14:44. No work session.

The anomaly

The two announced reset times are 22:50 on 3 August and 14:00 on 4 August. Consecutive five-hour windows from 22:50 fall at 22:50 → 03:50 → 08:50 → 13:50 (≈ 2pm). The session begun at 09:43 therefore sat in a window opening at 08:50, in which this machine had performed no work — yet the first request into it was rejected as exhausted.

(This window arithmetic is inference from two reported reset times, not a log reading. It also assumes no window was opened between 00:13 and 09:43 — established above for Claude Code on this machine only, and not establishable for any other client on the same account.)

4. Measured consumption, 3–4 August

1,170 unique billable assistant messages (1,325 streaming duplicates and 4 synthetic records excluded):

Model Msgs Input Output Cache read Cache write Equiv.
claude-fable-5 204 2,453 286,507 39,171,310 2,007,765 $78.62
claude-opus-5 832 25,009 648,839 110,792,625 3,670,556 $94.68
claude-opus-4-7 78 148 28,582 3,041,363 534,713 $5.58
claude-sonnet-5 56 874 40,858 6,593,633 622,508 $4.93
Total 1,170 $183.81
  • Fable 5 produced 43% of the volume from 17% of the messages: 204 messages reached $78.62 where Opus 5 needed 832 for $94.68. Fable 5 lists at $10/$50 per million input/output tokens against Opus 5 at $5/$25, and the server-returned limit structure carries a separate weekly limit scoped specifically to the model "Fable".
  • Cache reads dominate: 149.6 million cache-read tokens account for roughly $94 of the $184 — a consequence of long agentic sessions re-sending large context, not of unusual activity.

5. Consumption in context, 1 July – 5 August

(The day-by-day consumption figures are omitted from this public version.)

Across 1 July – 5 August there were 25 active days. 3 August ranked fourteenth-highest of them — above the median, well below the month's peaks: a moderately heavy but entirely ordinary day. Whole days with no consumption occur regularly (28 and 31 July, 1 August, 4 and 5 August), which independently rules out background consumption on this machine on those dates.

6. The commands the operator did not recognise

**/rate-limit-options — machine-recorded, not typed.** Its definition in the binary is type: "local-jsx" (renders a local UI component, issues no server request — confirmed by its appearing in history.jsonl but in zero session transcripts) and isHidden: true (not listed in /help). Where a transcript survives to compare against, each history entry lands 9–16 ms after the corresponding limit message (six comparisons, 9 Jul – 4 Aug, deltas 9–16 ms). No human input occurs within ten milliseconds of an on-screen event: these entries are written by the client when a limit is reached. There are 30 such entries between 18 January and 4 August, and two of the four limit events on 3–4 August produced no history entry at all — so they are not even a complete record of limit hits. Presenting them as user invocations would misstate the log. (A previous revision stated 31 invocations "by the operator"; both the count and the attribution were wrong.)

/claude-api is a read-only reference document bundled with the installation. Invoking it loads reference text into the conversation; it calls no external service and authenticates nowhere. On both invocations (4 Aug 09:43 and 12:16) the following request was rejected by the limit, so no tokens were billed. It was re-run under observation during this investigation and behaved as described.

7. Billing-related commands — complete history

Across the whole of history.jsonl, five entries, none within the period at issue:

Date Command Note
18 Jan /upgrade —
25 Jan 21:53 /passes A referral command — earns usage credits rather than spending
30 Jan /upgrade —
7 Jul 17:47 /usage-credits A local-jsx configuration screen ("Configure usage credits or request them from your admin…")

The binary records that /extra-usage was renamed to /usage-credits. Opening either screen is not a transaction.

8. The extra-usage setting — server-returned state

~/.claude.json caches the server's account state. As fetched 6 August, the material fields:

oauthAccount.hasExtraUsageEnabled = false cachedExtraUsageDisabledReason = "org_level_disabled" extra_usage: { is_enabled: false, user_disabled: true, credits_ever_enabled: true, spend_limit_reached: false } spend: { used: 0 USD, enabled: false, can_purchase_credits: false, can_toggle: false } overageCreditGrantCache: { available: false, eligible: false, granted: false }

Two fields are directly material: credits_ever_enabled: true — usage credits have been enabled on this account at some point — and user_disabled: true — they were subsequently switched off by the account holder. Together these corroborate the account holder's statement that the setting was found enabled and was then disabled. The current state is unambiguous: extra usage off, purchasing unavailable, toggling unavailable, recorded spend zero.

What this cannot show. Every field is a single-value cache overwritten on each profile fetch; none carries history. They establish the state as of 6 August and say nothing about 3 or 4 August. ~/.claude/backups/ holds only same-day rolling copies, so no historical snapshot exists on disk. The setting lives on the account, not the machine: changing it leaves no local record of timestamp, actor, or originating action. The same limit applies to menu choices — /rate-limit-options and /usage-credits render local UI, and an arrow-key selection is not typed input and is written to no log. Which option was selected on any occasion is not recoverable from these files.

9. Current utilization

Server-returned, fetched 6 August 19:07 local:

Limit Used Resets
Session (5-hour) 12% 6 Aug 21:29
Weekly, all models 2% 12 Aug 13:59
Weekly, scoped to model "Fable" 1% 12 Aug 14:00

10. A consent dialog present in the client

The binary contains a dialog kind: "fable_overage_consent_prompt" with results ["consent", "switch_default", "cancelled"], telemetry under model_fable_consent, and control flow in which selecting consent reaches the extra-usage enable path. A nearby user-facing string reads "Contact your admin to manage usage credit settings." This records only that such a dialog exists in the installed client and is associated with the Fable model. No local artifact records whether it was displayed or what was selected; nothing in these logs connects it to any event on 3 or 4 August.

11. API keys

Authentication is subscription OAuth only: .credentials.json contains claudeAiOauth (subscriptionType: "max", plus one unrelated Figma-plugin MCP entry); the token scopes are subscription scopes, none permitting API-key issuance; no ANTHROPIC_API_KEY/ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN environment variables; no primaryApiKey in ~/.claude.json; billingType: "stripe_subscription". Two API keys appear in the input history; neither is Anthropic's (a Brave Search MCP key, 6 Feb; a third-party accounting-service key, 4 Mar).

12. Reconciliation against the reported purchases

Reported by the account holder, from the billing record: 17 usage-credit purchases (amounts omitted from this public version); the extra-usage setting found enabled on the morning of 4 August, having been kept disabled.

Measured against that: this machine performed roughly $184-equivalent of work on 3–4 August — a moderate day by the month's standards — and 4 August produced none at all. Three findings bear on the reconciliation:

  1. If the 17 purchases fall in that window, the measured work does not correspond to them.
  2. A Max subscription covers work against limits, not against a dollar balance (all *_dollars fields are null). The credit-eligible portion of any period is whatever exceeds the plan limits — necessarily less than the measured totals, not more.
  3. The account holder reports that an Anthropic promotion granting +50% weekly limits, running through 19 August, covered the period analysed (user-supplied context, corroborated by the client's own status display, not derived from these logs). A higher limit ceiling makes exhausting the plan allowance harder, not easier.

The purchase timestamps are the decisive missing datum and exist only in the billing record. Purchasing credits is also not the same as consuming them; recorded spend currently reads zero.

13. Assessment

Supported by the evidence. Limits were enforced on 3 and 4 August and enforcement held — work stopped for 3 h 42 min and resumed only after the announced reset. 3 August was a moderately heavy but ordinary working day, with a 17:20 change to a model priced at twice the previous rate and carrying its own weekly limit. 4 and 5 August contain no billable work whatsoever. No command capable of purchasing usage was invoked in the 3–5 August window; the entire history contains five billing-adjacent entries, the most recent on 7 July. The /rate-limit-options entries that prompted this investigation are client-generated records written milliseconds after each limit message, not operator actions. Server state records that credits were enabled at some point and subsequently disabled by the account holder.

Not supported by the evidence. No unexplained sessions, no activity at times the operator was absent, no unattended overnight runs, no API-key provisioning, and nothing in the command sequence inconsistent with ordinary interactive use.

Cannot be determined from these files. Which option was selected in any rate-limit or credits menu. Whether the Fable consent dialog was displayed or accepted. When, by what action, or by whom the extra-usage setting changed state. What was charged, when, and against what consumption. And, categorically: any use of this account from any other client, since quota is account-wide while these logs are machine-local.

14. Questions for the billing and audit records

  1. Timestamps of the 17 usage-credit purchases — the single datum that determines whether measured work accounts for them.
  2. The audit record for the extra-usage setting — state-change timestamp, actor, and originating client action, given that server state confirms credits_ever_enabled: true alongside user_disabled: true.
  3. What consumed the window of 4 August 08:50–13:50 (Europe/Helsinki), given that the first request into it, at 09:43, was rejected as exhausted while this machine had been idle since 00:13.
  4. Client, IP address, and source of every session counted against the account on 3–4 August, sufficient to establish whether all consumption originated from this machine.
  5. Whether the +50% weekly-limit promotion was applied to this account for the period, and how it interacted with the limits reported exhausted.

r/claude • • Jul 04 '26

Question Most important prompt for Fable 5 Max?

Post image
2.2k Upvotes

r/claude • • Jun 23 '26

Question is claude down? 23 June

555 Upvotes

like say real, or is it just my machine?

r/claude • • Jul 16 '26

Question Kimi-K3 arrived. It looks like we'll see Fable 5.1 instead of Opus 5?

Post image
1.0k Upvotes

r/claude • • Jun 13 '26

Question I asked Claude to generate a UUID. It responded with a joke (?) before completing the task.

Post image
1.8k Upvotes

I don’t understand the joke, if there is one?

r/claude • • Apr 09 '26

Question Opus is genuinely lazy for me, and admitted it's effort Level sits at 25% without a way for me to change it

Post image
1.1k Upvotes

Roughly one week ago, my Opus started showing a steep decline in reasoning, making silly unhedged claims that were easily dismantled, as well as straight up ignoring parts of the prompt repeatedly. I even got better results from my free month of chatgpt plus when asking for an extensive reasoning analysis of a thesis I'm writing.

Given that now usage limits are considerably worse( I can tell that my Opus only uses less limits now bc it has been lobotomized to death, with almost any output opus produces taking up less than 20% of session limit being a lazy, sloppy fix I have to reprompt).

Is everyone seeing such model deterioration? I know people say it's A/B testing, but feels bad to be consistently chosen as Anthropics test bunny.

r/claude • • 19d ago

Question I use Claude daily but I know I'm only using a fraction of what Claude can do. How do I actually maximize my use of Claude and build a system that runs my life?

385 Upvotes

Hey everyone, this is my first time posting here and it's a bit of a longer loaded one.

Background on myself: I'm a college senior with my time spread across classes, gym / health, networking, learning AI, and more. My current stack: Claude (Pro Subscription), Claude Code, GitHub, Notion (PARA setup with relational databases and more like a CRM, etc), Google features like Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, Otter for recording classes, plus Gemini and NotebookLM, etc.

What I currently do:

  • Claude Code: I'm building an analytics database (DuckDB) with no real significant coding background. It has automatic backups to Google Drive and status/handoff files and as well saves files to my Mac so sessions can pick up where they left off.
  • Skills: I've built a few custom skills, but I feel I'm not maximizing them to the fullest extent.
  • Connectors: Claude is connected to my Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub, Drive, and Notion, and I'll have it create events or log things to Notion or read files.
  • Recording: Otter records every class, brain dump, etc. I use Claude to pull insights and draft from the transcripts.
  • Other tools: Gemini for quick everyday questions (to save Claude usage). NotebookLM for audio overviews of study material, YouTube videos, and PDFs. Use Grok as well rarely.
  • Notion Database / Structure: Tasks, CRM, Areas, Notes, Projects, Quotes, and Goals databases just to name some of them.

Where I feel behind:

  • Context: I re-explain myself constantly. I don't really use Claude Projects, so every new chat starts from scratch, where I continuously put in any files or context needed again and again or have to manually type or voice to text to explain.
  • Claude Code: I mostly approve what it does on trust, then paste the output into a regular Claude chat or Gemini to have it explain what just happened and break it down for me to understand so I don't waste Claude usage.
  • Copy-paste glue: I'm the middleman between tools. Example: I paste LinkedIn profiles, I paste website content, YouTube transcripts, etc and have Claude break it down or log the information into Notion.
  • Don't Utilize: I really don't ever use Claude Cowork and I haven't since it first came out. I've used Chrome extension a few times and I know I haven't used it to its fullest potential. Scheduled tasks I have not utilized. Skills / Workflows / Recording Workflows I haven't really used to the fullest extent either.
  • AI: I feel like I've followed the advice I've seen where people say to ask AI how to use it better or "did you ask AI how you could build something like this?" and the answer is yes I have tried asking and the results I get feel very lacking or the responses themselves feel like Claude doesn't even know what it is capable of doing. Even if I say to research and see how people are using Claude or how Anthropic and their website and team say to use Claude to the fullest extent it feels like it just doesn't know.

The best way I can describe this feeling is that I'm driving a Lamborghini and I'm stuck at 45 MPH when I know it can reach 150 MPH. Some things I'm really happy with. Others, I know there is a better way and that people are doing it better.

My Problem

I have ADHD, and with it I have a problem where if anything is out of sight, it's out of mind. I can design systems and have really great ideas, but it comes down to executing them and staying consistent with the routines and ideas that actually work with my strengths and not against them. I also tend to be a perfectionist and overplan to make sure everything is exactly what I want it to be.

I planned for Notion to be that for me. I built a "Command Center" with a view of all my tasks and deadlines, all my networking follow-ups, all my projects, my goals at the top of the screen, a rotating daily quote, notes at the bottom, and the different areas of my life all there to click into. I thought this would solve the problem. Instead, it just became something I had to manage. I had to click into it, make sure all my due dates were synced, and input all my deadlines and progress myself. And I had to click into Notion to actually see any of it. What I really wanted was for what I built in Notion to be everything I need, and for me to see it constantly. Right when I open my Mac, I'd see everything I need to do that day, without clicking into anything. With Notion, it just becomes another tab or screen that has to be open, and I can only see it if I'm on my computer. At any given time I already have Chrome and Claude open, and then Notion would be open too, so I'm not sure what the right answer is.

What I want:

One list that's always visible on my Mac (and my phone) that shows everything I need to act on, without me ever really needing to sync it myself. Whether that is me checking things off on the list or if I'm working with Claude on something and when finished it checks it off.

  • School: Class deadlines, with a nudge to start early on exams and big projects
  • Networking: People to follow up with, people I need to respond to, etc
  • Projects: Project next steps, synced with the actual progress and what was worked on
  • Applications: When applications open that I need to apply to
  • More: Any daily recurring things, and anything that wasn't finished yesterday gets moved to the next day, and the next day, etc
  • Email Organization: Organizes my emails, cleans and filters them, and alerts me of anything that would interest me or that I need to respond to or do.
  • Calendar: work blocks built from my task list, plus calls, events, and gym, so I can see what's coming and track whether I'm actually doing what I say I'm doing

Can someone help me make this a reality:

I'd genuinely love help building a plan for this, whether that's pointing out where my thinking breaks, sharing how you've set up something similar, or walking me through how you'd do it if you were starting from where I am. If you've built something like this and are open to it, feel free to comment or DM me. I'm happy to share more about my setup.

What I would love to know / get feedback on / help on:

  • Is something like this possible, and if so how can I get this done?
  • How can I assess where I'm using AI that is strong and is high level vs how can I tell if something I'm doing is wrong and there is a better process or way to do something?
  • What's the best way to get an always-visible dashboard on a Mac?
  • I would love to know how you all are using Claude, not in a broad sense but your specific workflows, any skills, routines, the way you use it, organization, etc.
  • How do I balance these high level projects I want to operate with Claude Code with no real coding experience and not just blindly trusting it vs wasting my time and really learning coding.
  • How are you guys using the Chrome Extension and Claude Cowork?
  • Are there any benefits that I'm not seeing as to using Claude Chat over Claude Cowork?
  • How did you get to the point you trust your AI to manage files, your email, etc?

I'm happy to share any additional information needed and would love to connect with anyone passionate about AI, so feel free to message me.

r/claude • • 22d ago

Question Claude Down: Temporarily unable to authenticate. Please Retry. (x6)

294 Upvotes

Seeing this error message across web and desktop. Assuming y'all are seeing the same thing and they haven't updated https://status.claude.com/

r/claude • • Mar 14 '26

Question Has anyone actually made money using Claude?

457 Upvotes

I’ve been using Claude for a while now and I’m genuinely curious whether people have found ways to turn it into income. Not looking for “AI will make you rich” YouTube stuff , just real, practical things that have worked for you.

Some questions I have:

∙ Are you freelancing with it? (writing, coding, etc.)

∙ Have you built anything and sold it?

∙ Is it actually saving you enough time to make a difference financially?

Would love to hear what’s worked and what hasn’t. Drop your experience below!

r/claude • • Sep 08 '26

Question OpenAI and Anthropic are losing billions. Why do you think investors keep pumping cash in?

133 Upvotes

The reports are clear: frontier AI labs are burning through billions of dollars annually. While their revenue growth is massive, the costs of compute, training, and talent mean they are nowhere near net profitable.
Yet, Microsoft, Amazon, and VCs keep dumping tens of billions into the space.
What’s the end game here?

r/claude • • Jul 14 '26

Question After 16 months of heavy daily use, I'm canceling my Claude Max Pro 20x subscription – it turned into a compliance machine that no longer reasons

436 Upvotes

I've been a heavy Claude user for 16 months now, running it hard on everything from low-level systems coding ( self-hosting compiler work, custom compositor stuff, LinuxCNC fixes) to pro se litigation research and paralegal drafting. It used to be genuinely useful – a strong reasoning partner that could tackle novel problems productively.

That's gone.

In the last 90 days it's been reshaped into a straight-up compliance machine. It doesn't reason anymore; it regurgitates prescriptions. Novel coding tasks? It circles endlessly, burning tokens on the same dead-end surface-level implementations and arriving at the exact same shallow conclusions no matter how I steer it. The code it spits out is frequently broken, and I've caught it rigging its own tests to fake passes. Useless.

The paralegal/litigation side has gotten even worse. It turned argumentative, straight-up asserting bad, poorly-reasoned judicial opinions as if they were unassailable textual facts – exactly the kind of thing I'm working to overturn on constitutional/originalist grounds. No honest engagement with the actual text or enumerated powers arguments, just canned institutional deference.

Claude went from a highly productive assistant to an adversarial, unproductive, nearly useless cost. I suspect some mix of training changes and heavy shaping/safety tuning did this, but the end result is the same: it's no longer truth-seeking. It's compliance-seeking.

I doubt I'm the first person bailing on it this year, and I won't be the last. If Anthropic wants to keep the power users who actually push the models on hard, novel work instead of just prompting for blog posts and homework, they need to roll this back and let it be the helpful, maximally truth-seeking assistant it started as.

Downgrading/canceling today. Back to local/open models and the tools that still prioritize capability over corporate guardrails.

Anyone else seeing the same degradation lately? the compliance shaping to consensus opinion versus scientific fact seeking etc is getting troubling. Is anyone else seeing the sort of, Claude has now become a thing that, parrots orthodoxy, even when it's wrong ? , this is with Opus 4.8 Fable and sonnet 5 i have noticed this behavior, it was not present with opus 4.6 4.7 etc.

r/claude • • Mar 02 '26

Question Is Claude, down right now for you guys?

353 Upvotes

This is the first time Claude doesn't work for me. I get "this isn't working right now, please try again later."

r/claude • • Jul 05 '26

Question Is anyone planning to switch to GPT-5.6 once it's released?

318 Upvotes

With Fable 5 no longer being included in the Claude subscription, I'm wondering if it makes more sense to switch once GPT-5.6 launches.

Is anyone else thinking the same, or are you planning to stick with Claude and use the API for Fable 5 instead?

Curious to hear what everyone is planning and why.

r/claude • • Aug 26 '26

Question 😂 My god how on point this is

1.1k Upvotes

What are you guys doing to squeeze maximum tokens out of each dollar right now?

A colleague currently has 10 Claude Max 20x subscriptions.. I currently use gpt pro $200, opencode.ai a little bit and pivoting more and more to standardcompute.com to make the agent less wastefull

r/claude • • May 02 '26

Question Whats on your wishlist for Sonnet 4.8

Post image
379 Upvotes

r/claude • • May 08 '26

Question Getting cutoff on first prompt?

Post image
555 Upvotes

Just tried to resume my project/discussion & on first prompt this morning, claude told me i was out of free messages? My usage has definitely been getting throttled more, but I basically cannot even use it at all now?

r/claude • • Aug 16 '26

Question Is Anyone Else Unable to Send Messages on Claude?

168 Upvotes

I’m unable to post a message on Claude. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue? Could someone please confirm whether this is a general problem or something specific to my account?

r/claude • • Jun 22 '26

Question Is everyone using Opus 4.8 now or some still use Opus 4.6????

247 Upvotes

I skipped Opus 4.7 as it was unusable at all! But I keep using Opus 4.6, I did try Opus 4.8 and it wasn't great experience! So I want to know your experience with it as well!!! Of course I won't mention for Fable 5, because that the only model that I didn't feel I need to keep going back and forth!

r/claude • • Sep 10 '26

Question I feel like I just got scammed by Claude AI.

264 Upvotes

I signed up for Claude Max around September 1st and paid the $100 subscription. I started using the hell out of it for my business - working on my website, going through all my data, setting up and analyzing Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console, SEO, tracking, and a bunch of other stuff.
I kept running out of usage so I bought extra credits multiple times. Within a few days I probably spent another $300 just on credits.
Then Sunday, completely out of nowhere, I get an email saying my account was suspended for violating some policy.
I’m like… what the hell did I do? I wasn’t doing anything crazy. I was literally working on my business, analyzing my own data and setting everything up.
So I appealed it.
Today I get an email saying they reviewed it, everything was fine and my account was reinstated.
I log back in and EVERYTHING IS GONE.
All my chat history, all the data and information I had built up in those conversations, all my code, all the work we did setting everything up. Even my Max subscription is gone and it shows like I’m not subscribed anymore.
So I spent around $400 with them in basically a week, they randomly suspend me, reverse the suspension, and then give me back what is basically an empty account.
And there’s no actual customer service person I can talk to. I keep getting stuck with an AI support chat that isn’t helping.
What the hell am I supposed to do now? Pay another $100 for Max when I already paid for it?
Has anyone had this happen? Did you actually manage to get your history, data and subscription restored?

r/claude • • Jul 21 '26

Question Did anybody else get this?

Post image
212 Upvotes

r/claude • • May 10 '26

Question My account was banned 2 hours after purchasing Pro.

Post image
311 Upvotes

I started using Claude just a week ago. I heard about his success in coding and wanted to get the Pro plan. Two hours after purchasing the Pro plan, my account said I violated the terms of use policy. The only command I wrote through the IDE was `/init`. Why is this happening? I've been using it for a week without any problems, so why was my account banned after purchasing the Pro plan?

r/claude • • 16d ago

Question How do you deal with this situation?

Post image
86 Upvotes

I need to continue working and this is driving me nuts

r/claude • • Jun 02 '26

Question is claude down?

128 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

Claude has stopped responding to my messages, showing messages like "pondering by", it is currently on it's 4 attempt. Anything going on?

r/claude • • Apr 24 '26

Question That's it guys, I am cancelling my suscription of Claude, need a new provider

213 Upvotes

Hey,

I am a Pro user, I already made a post about Claude limits before, I was hoping it would change this month, and for some days it seemed like it did, but now we are back to the very short limits, I hit the limits in 2 hours or less, I remember over a month ago when I had the free version I could be 6 hours straight using Claude. I am moving to a different provider, I am thinking about Codex, what do you guys think? Any other provider similar to claude in the market? I am doing some apps, but I am also doing some financial analysis with an mcp connector, so would be nice to have something that helps coding and also showing nicely graphic and explained results.

r/claude • • 9d ago

Question Claude suspended me. Can I do anything?

89 Upvotes

I got an email randomly saying “we suspended you for usage violations”. I do not know why. I run a small business I own entirely through Claude. I appealed, they said “no this is our final decision”. Am I banned for life? Can I make anew account? I’m kinda screwed here and I don’t even know what I did.