Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users.

Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. The one thing I learned from being on the other side of this is that if someone seems like an unreliable narrator, they probably are. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want.

There are so many things about this article that don't make sense:

> 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.

I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google?

There is, without a doubt, more to this story than is being relayed.

You're not alone.

I think the author was doing some sort of circular prompt injection between two instances of Claude? The author claims "I'm just scaffolding a project" but that doesn't appear to be the case, or what resulted in the ban...

The author was using instance A of Claude to update a `claude.md` while another instance B of Claude was consuming that file. When Claude B did something wrong, the author asked Claude A to update the `claude.md` so that Claude B didn’t make the same mistake again

My rudimentary guess is this. When you write in all caps, it triggers sort of a alert at Anthropic, especially as an attempt to hijack system prompt. When one claude was writing to other, it resorted to all caps, which triggered the alert, and then the context was instructing the model to do something (which likely would be similar to a prompt injection attack) and that triggered the ban. not just caps part, but that in combination of trying to change the system characteristics of claude. OP does not know much better because it seems he wasn't closely watching what claude was writing to other file.

if this is true, the learning is opus 4.5 can hijack system prompts of other models.

Yeah, I couldn't follow this "disabled organization" and "non-disabled organization" naming either.

Normally you can customize the agents behavior via a CLAUDE.md file. OP automated that process by having another agent customize the first agent. The customizer agent got pushy, the customized agent got offended, OP got banned.

From reading the whole thing, it kind of seems clickbaity. Yes, they're the only user in the "organization" that got banned, but they apparently still are using the other "organization" without issue, so they as a human are not banned. There's certainly a valid complaint to be made about the lack of recourse or customer service response for the automated ban, but it almost seems like they intentionally were trying to be misleading by implying that since they were the only member of the organization, they were banned from using Claude.

Agreed, I found this rather incoherent and seeming to depend on knowing a lot more about author's project/background.

I had to read it twice as well, I was so confused hah. I’m still confused

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

Me neither; However, just like the rest I can only speculate (given the available information): I guess the following pieces provide a hint what's really going on here:

- "The quine is the quine" (one of the sub-headline of the article) and the meaning of the word "quine".

- Author's "scaffolding" tool which, once finished, had acquired the "knowledge"[1] how to add a CLAUDE.md baked instructions for a particular homemade framework (he's working on).

- Anthropic saying something like: no, stop; you cannot "copy"[1] Claude knowledge no matter how "non-serious" your scaffolding tool or your use-case is: as it might "shows", other Claude users, that there's a way to do similar things, maybe that time, for more "serious" tools.

---

[1]. Excerpt from the Author's blog post: "I would love to see the face of that AI (Claude AI system backend) when it saw its own 'system prompt' language being echoed back to it (from Author's scaffolding tool: assuming it's complete and fully-functional at that time)."

You are confused because the message from Claude is confusing. Author is not an organization, they had an account with anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as organization.

Sounds like OP has multiple org accounts with Anthropic.

The main one in the story (disabled) is banned because iterating on claude.md files looks a lot like iterating on prompt injections, especially as it sounds the multiple Claude's got into it with each other a bit

The other org sounds like the primary account with all the important stuff. Good on OP for doing this work in a separate org, a good recommendation across a lot of vendors and products.

Yeah, referring to yourself once as a "disabled organisation" is a good bit, referencing anthropics silly terminology. Keeping it for the duration made this a very hard follow

Right. This is almost unreadable. There are words, but the author seems to be too far down a rabbit hole to communicate the problem properly…

You and me, brother. The writing is unnecessarily convoluted.

I think you missed the joke: he isn't an organization at all, but the error message claims he is.