I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

I was recently kicked out from ChatGPT because I wrote "a*hole" in a context where ChatGPT constantly kept repeating nonsense! I find the ban by OpenAI to be very intrusive. Remember, ChatGPT is a machine! And I did not hurt any sentient being with my statement, nor was the GPT chat public. As long as I do not hurt any feeling beings with my thoughts, I can do whatever I want, can't I? After all, as the saying goes, "Thoughts are free." Now, one could argue that the repeated use of swear words, even in private, negatively influences one's behavior. However, there is no repeated use here. I don't run around the flat all day swearing. Anyone who basically insinuates such a thing, like OpenAI, is, as I said, intrusive. I want to be able to use a machine the way I want to! As long as no one else is harmed, of course...

I've been doing something a lot like this, using a claude-desktop instance attached to my personal mcp server to spawn claude-code worker nodes for things, and for a month or two now it's been working great using the main desktop chat as a project manager of sorts. I even started paying for MAX plan as I've been using it effectively to write software now (I am NOT a developer).

Lately it's gotten entirely flaky, where chat's will just stop working, simply ignoring new prompots, and otherwise go unresponsive. I wondered if maybe I'm pissing them off somehow like the author of this article did.

Now even worse is Claude seemingly has no real support channel. You get their AI bot, and that's about it. Eventually it will offer to put you through to a human, and then tell you that don't wait for them, they'll contact you via email. That email never comes after several attempts.

I'm assuming at this point any real support is all smoke and mirrors, meaning I'm paying for a service now that has become almost unusable, with absolutely NO means of support to fix it. I guess for all the cool tech, customer support is something they have not figured out.

I love Claude as it's an amazing tool, but when it starts to implode on itself that you actually require some out-of-box support, there is NONE to be had. Grok seems the only real alternative, and over my dead body would I use anything from "him".

I also got banned from Claude over a year ago. The signup process threw an error and I couldn't try again because they took my phone number. The support system was a Google form petition to be unblocked. I am still mad about it to this day.

Edit: my only other comment on HN is also complaining about this 11 months ago

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

I was asking Claude for sci-fi book recommendations "theme similar to X, awarded Y or Z").

I was also banned for that. Also didn't get the "FU" in email. Thankfully at least I didn't pay for this, but I'd file chargeback instantly if I could.

If anyone from Claude is reading it, you're c**s.

Similar thing happened to me back in November 19 shortly after GitHub outage (which sent CC into repeated requests and time outs to GitHub) while beta testing Claude Code Web.

Banned and appeal declined without any real explanation to what happened, other than saying "violation of ToS" which can be basically anything, except there was really nothing to trigger that, other than using their most of the free credits they gave to test CC Web in less than a week. (No third party tools or VPN or anything really) There were many people had similar issues at the same time, reported on Reddit, so it wasn't an isolated case.

Companies and their brand teams work hard to create trust, then an automated false-positive can break that trust in a second.

As their ads say: "Keep thinking. There has never been a better time to have a problem."

I've been thinking since then, what was the problem. But I guess I will "Keep thinking".

We really need some law to stop "you have been banned and we won't even tell you actual reason for it", it's become a plague, made worse with automated systems giving out a ban

I am really confused as to what happened here. The use of ‘disabled organization’ to refer to the author made it extra confusing.

I think I kind of have an idea what the author was doing, but not really.

> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.

This... sounds highly concerning

The future (the PRESENT):

You are only allowed to program computers with the permission of mega corporations.

When Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini have banned you, you must leave the industry.

When you sign up, you must provide legal assurance that no LLM has ever banned you (much like applying for insurance). If true then you will be denied permission to program - banned by one, banned by all.

They don't actually know this is why they were banned:

> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.

> Or I don't know. This is all just a guess from me.

And no response from support.

I had very similar experience with my disabled organization on another provider. After 3 hours of my script sending commands to gemini-cli for execution i got disabled and then in 2 days my gmail was disabled. Good thing that it was disposable account, not the primary one.

I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you expect.

Out of all of the tech organizations, frontier labs are the one org you'd expect to be trying out cutting edge forms of support. Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit?

I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical. Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let loose.

I also think it's essential for the anthropic platform in the long-run. And not just in the obvious ways (customer loyalty etc). I don't know if anyone has brought this up at Anthropic, but it's such a huge risk for Anthropic's long-term strategic position. They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support, then why should we?"

This blog post feels really fishy to me.

It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are.

For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.

I've noticed an uptick in

    API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"Output blocked by content filtering policy"},

According to Claude:

    I don't have visibility into exactly what triggered the content filter - it was likely a false positive. The code I'm writing (pinyin/Chinese/English mode detection for a language learning search feature) is completely benign.

I was also banned from claude. I created an account and created a single prompt: "Hello, how are you?". After that I was banned. An automated system flagged me as doing something against the ToS.

That's why we should strive to use and optimize local LLMs.

Or better yet, we should setup something that allows people to share a part of their local GPU processing (like SETI@home) for a distributed LLM that cannot be censored. And somehow be compensated when it's used for inference

I had my Claude Code account banned a few months ago. Contacted support and heard nothing. Registered a new account and been doing the same thing ever since - no issues.

See it as a honour with distinction: the future skynet AI (aka Claude) considers you as person with his/her own opinion.

By the way, since as of late, google search redirects me to a "are you a bot?" question constantly. The primary reason is because I no longer use google search directly via the browser, but instead via the commandline (and for some weird reason chrome does not keep my settings, as I start it exclusively via the --no-sandbox option). We really need alternatives to Google - this is getting out of hand how much top-down control these corporations now have over our digital lives.

> AI moderation is currently a "black box" that prioritizes safety over accuracy to an extreme degree.

I think there's a wide spread in how that's implemented. I would certainly not describe Grok as a tool that's prioritized safety at all.

Seems weird, I have Claude's review other claude's work all the time. Maybe not as adversarily as that lol, i tend to encourage the instances to work collectively.

Also the API timeouts that people complain about - i see them on my Linux box a fair bit, especially when it has a lot of background tasks open, but it seems pretty rock solid on my Windows machine.

Why is the author so confused about the use of the word "organization"? Every account in Claude is part of an organization even if it's an organization of one. It's just the way they have accounts structured. And it's not like they hide this fact. It shows you your organization ID right on your account page. I'm also pretty sure I've seen the term used when performing other account-related actions.

We've been running exactly this pattern for weeks - CLAUDE.md with project context, HANDOFF.md with session state, multiple Claude instances reading and updating the same files. No issues so far. The pattern works well for maintaining continuity across sessions. Curious if the ban was about the self-modification loop specifically, or something else in the prompt content that triggered detection. The lack of explanation makes it impossible to know what's actually off-limits.

Can someone explain what he was actually doing here?

Was the issue that he was reselling these Claude.md files, or that he was selling project setup or creation services to his clients?

Or maybe all scaffolding activity (back and forth) looked like automated usage?

Forget the ethical or environmental concerns, I don't want to mess with LLMs because it seems like everyone who goes heavy on them ends up sounding like they're on the verge of cracking up.

I am doing very similar thing to this and no issue. Even though I am using GLM 4.7 due to cost

I have a complete org hierarchy for Claudes. Director, EM and Worker Claude Code instances working on a very long horizon task.

Code is open source: https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator

I can't wait to be able to run this kind of software locally, on my own buck.

But I've seen orgs bite the bullet in the last 18 months and what they deployed is miles behind what Claude Code can do today. When the "Moore's Law" curve for LLM capability improvements flattens out, it will be a better time to lock into a locally hosted solution.

OT: Has anyone observed that Claude Code in CLI works more reliably than the web or desktop apps?

I can run very long, stable sessions via Claude Code, but the desktop app regularly throws errors or simply stops the conversation. A few weeks ago, Anthropic introduced conversation compaction in the Claude web app. That change was very welcome, but it no longer seems to work reliably. Conversations now often stop progressing. Sometimes I get a red error message, sometimes nothing at all. The prompt just cannot be submitted anymore.

I am an early Claude user and subscribed to the Max plan when it launched. I like their models and overall direction, but reliability has clearly degraded in recent weeks.

Another observation: ChatGPT Pro tends to give much more senior and balanced responses when evaluating non-technical situations. Claude, in comparison, sometimes produces suggestions that feel irrational or emotionally driven. At this point, I mostly use Claude for coding tasks, but not for project or decision-related work, where the responses often lack sufficient depth.

Lastly, I really like Claude’s output formatting. The Markdown is consistently clean and well structured, and better than any competitor I have used. I strongly dislike ChatGPT’s formatting and often feed its responses into Claude Haiku just to reformat them into proper Markdown.

Curious whether others are seeing the same behavior.

i accidently logged in from my browser that is set to use a socks proxy instead of chrome which i dont set to a proxy and was otherwise using claude code with. they quickly banned me and refunded my subscription. i dont know if its worth it to try to appeal. does a human even read those appeals? figured i could just use cursor and gemini models with api pricing. but im sad to not be able to try claude code i had just signed up.

I've triggered similar conversation level safety blocks on a personal Claude account by using an instance of Deepseek to feed in Claude output and then create instructions that would be copied back over to Claude (there wasn't any real utility to this, it was just an experiment). Which sounds kind of similar to this. I couldn't understand what the heuristic was trying to guard against, but I think it's related to concerns about prompt injections and users impersonating Claude responses. I'm also surprised the same safeguards would exist in either the API or coding subscription.

Exactly as predicted: the means of production yet again taken away from the masses to be centralized in a few absurdly rich hands.

I ran out of tokens for not just the 5 hour sessions, but all models for the week. Had to wait a day -- so my methadone equivalent was to strap an endpoint-rewriting proxy to Claude Code and backend it with a local Qwen3 30B Coder. It was.. somewhat adequate. Just as fast, but not as capable as Opus 4.5 - I think it could handle carefully specced small greenfield projects, but it was getting tangled in my Claudefield mess.

All that to say -- be prepared, have a local fallback! The lords are coming for your ploughshares.

So you have two AIs. Let's call them Claude and Hal. Whenever Claude gets something wrong, Hal is shown what went wrong and asked to rewrite the claude.md prompt to get Claude to do it right. Eventually Hal starts shouting at Claude.

Why is this inevitable? Because Hal only ever sees Claude's failures and none of the successes. So of course Hal gets frustrated and angry that Claude continually gets everything wrong no matter how Hal prompts him.

(Of course it's not really getting frustrated and annoyed, but a person would, so Hal plays that role)

You are lucky they refunded you. Imagine they didn't ban you and you continued to pay 220 a month.

I once tried Claude made a new account and asked it to create a sample program it refused. I asked it to create a simple game and it refused. I asked it to create anything and it refused.

For playing around just go local and write your own multi agent wrapper. Much more fun and it opens many more possibilities with uncensored llms. Things will take longer but you'll end up at the same place.. with a mostly working piece of code you never want to look at.

> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.

Is it me or is this word salad?

>Yes, the only e-mail I got was a credit note giving my money back.

That's great news ! They don't have nearly enough staff to deal with support issues, so they default to reimbursement. Which means if you do this every month, you get Claude for free :)

Claude started to get "wonky" about a month ago. It refused to use instructions files I generated using a tool I wrote. My account was not banned but many of the things I usually asked would just not produce any real result. Claude was working but ignoring some commands. I finally canceled my subscription and I am trying other providers.

What is "scaffolding?"

I have also been a bit paranoid about this in terms of using Claude itself to decompile/deobfuscate Claude code in order to patch it to create the user experience I need. Looks like I’ll be using other tools to do that from now on.

While it sucks, I had great results replacing Sonnet 4.5 with GLM 4.7 in Claude code. Vastly more affordable too ($3 a month for the pro equivalent). Can’t say much about Opus though. Claude code forces me to put a credit card on file so they can charge over usage. I don’t mind they charge me, I do mind that there’s no apparent spending limit and hard to tell how much “inclusive” opus tokens I have left.

The post is light on details. I'd guess the author ended up hammering the API and they decided it was abuse.

I expect more reports like this. LLM providers are already selling tokens at a loss. If everyone starts to use tmux or orchestrate multiple agents then their loss on each plan is going to get much larger.

So you were generating and evaluating the performance of your CLAUDE.md files? And you got banned for it?

As a Claude Max user, that generally prefer’s claude, I will say that Gemini is working pretty well right now and I’m considering setting up a google workspace account so I can get Gemini with decent privacy.

Luckily there is little vendor lock in and likes of https://opencode.ai/ are picking up the slack

This is why it's worth investing in a model-agnostic setup. Don't tie yourself into a single model provider!

OpenHands, Toad, and OpenCode are fully OSS and LLM-agnostic

Scamthropic at it again

I've been using Claude Code with AWS Bedrock as the provider. Setup guide if you're interested: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/amazon-bedrock

> Or I don't know. This is all just a guess from me.

We need local models asap.

is there a benefit of using a separate claude instance to update the CLAUDE.md of the first? I always want to leverage the full context of the situation to help describe what went wrong, so doing it "inline" makes more sense.

It should be mentionned in the title that these are just speculations.