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otterleyyesterday at 4:42 PM15 repliesview on HN

There are many possible explanations for this outcome to have occurred other than malice. If you're an engineer by trade, consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend. Probably a lot.

How about we turn down the heat, everyone?


Replies

rv64imafdcyesterday at 5:03 PM

There's been a sustained pattern of incidents. If Anthropic were truly serious about not wanting to take people's money, then they would have put in place whatever review processes were necessary to stop this from happening. So regardless of whether or not they specifically intend to cause harm, they're willingly letting it happen, which is just about as bad.

Yes, it's reasonable to turn down the heat. But it's also reasonable for people to be upset when their money is taken from them, and when the company that does so is effectively beyond persecution for doing so.

loloquwowndueoyesterday at 5:04 PM

Even with the best of faiths, this is at the very least a shoddily vibe coded “detect and low-key block attempts to use Claude for Openclaw” - it decided to look for specific strings wrapped in json without realizing this doesn’t always imply it’s an actual payload for Openclaw itself. And the human driving it was too dumb to review/catch this bad inplementation.

So maybe not malice, but certainly a level of ineptitude I don’t expect from a crucial vendor from a tool that’s become essential for many developers.

(I don’t care, I do just fine when Claude is down or refuses to help me (it has happened) though)

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rohansood15yesterday at 5:08 PM

I am engineer by trade. If I pushed an update which wrongly busted my customer's usage limits at a trillion dollar company, I would expect to get fired. Alongside my EM.

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grayhatteryesterday at 6:00 PM

> consider how many bugs you've been responsible for over the course of your career that you didn't intend.

Through some amount of carelessness that ended up costing people money? 0.

Maybe 1 if you want to count the automated monthly charging system that did over charge (extra erroneous charges for the same month) a handful of clients too many times. I noticed before anyone else did, and all of those 1am charges were reversed before 4am. So I don't think that one counts because it was a boring bug that would have been very bad if I wasn't paying attention.

Incompetence to the point of negligence can reasonably be considered malicious. If you're an engineer by trade, you have an ethical and professional responsibility to make sure things like this can't happen. And then, when bugs introduce said complications, fixing them, and remediating the damage.

throwaw12yesterday at 5:06 PM

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

How about Anthropic turn down the heat and refunds money to everyone for every bug it created with its LLM?

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bad_haircut72yesterday at 4:46 PM

Yeah they probably just typed in "Hey Claude, figure out a way to get our inference spend under control - no mistakes!" and shipped it

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nickthegreekyesterday at 5:04 PM

And the stealing of $200 here? More non malice?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/53262#issue...

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ceejayozyesterday at 5:04 PM

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

The heat is coming, in part, from the lack of a proper support channel.

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Jcampuzano2yesterday at 5:11 PM

This would have been easy to say if it was the first time it or something similar happened.

But there is a clear pattern emerging. There's no reason to turn down the heat when a company of this size and influence is allowed this level of absurdity time and time again.

NetOpWibbyyesterday at 4:56 PM

Nuance? Ignorance vs malice? You think too highly of folks.

teifereryesterday at 5:30 PM

Well this regex nonsense was likely vibe coded. If it escaped quality checks then this is a testament to how dangerous things coming out of Anthropic are, but not in the scifi sense that their CEO tries to make everybody believe.

skywhopperyesterday at 6:00 PM

Nah, however this was implemented this was a clear and obvious probable side effect. If they want to block the access at the mention of openclaw, that’s silly but mostly harmless, but why charge extra for an ambiguous case? At best that’s incredibly lazy, which for a company with as much money, influence, and power as Anthropic, is equivalent to malice.

verdvermyesterday at 5:59 PM

This is not the first, nor likely last, of behavior like this.

My personal story is that I bought $50 of credit into their system, didn't use it all that much, and then after a year had gone by they kept the leftovers. I consider that a kind of theft.

surgical_fireyesterday at 5:21 PM

How about no?

Why should we coddle a corporations when they screw over customers?

It matters very little if they did this out of incompetence or malice.