alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do
After using Claude Code at work for months I wanted to use it on my own projects too. Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned after 1 hour of usage. I got my 120$ back. 1 month later I signed up with vpn off. But this time probably because I used the same credit cart (and that's the only card I can use) they banned me again.
Even after I contacted support I got a generic "we have determined that we cannot reinstate your account at this time due to a violation of our Usage Policy" answer.
I'm not using it for anything unusal. "Summarize that markdown file", "how can i refactor payment module" kind of questions mostly. I couldn't even move to real coding because 1 hour was only enough for investigation.
My last chance is HN to get some visibility on my case. My Boris sees it or some other Anthropic employee.
Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back?
Comments
Don’t worry about it, Anthropic is banned from releasing new models anyway.
Try out some of the competitors, they are really good these days.
I know it’s not ideal, but why not give the main competitor a go? I have great experience of using OpenAI Codex, and frequently switch between it and Claude on a whim, often playing them off against each other to review one another’s PRs.
I too was banned. Two key details: 1. I was unbanned via their appeal form, but 2. I had created a new account in the meantime which I’ve used since.
If you need a debit card, use Mercury https://www.mercury.com. You can create as many as you want. I use a unique card for each subscription. (If you’re thinking "oh, they’re like privacy.com," you’re mistaken. Privacy.com gets blocked by merchants; mercury works. No idea why.)
Since you’re already throwing around $120, I suspect Mercury’s sign up fee won’t be a problem. But if you want to bypass it, you can start an LLC and use your EIN during account setup for free Mercury access. I did it for about $20 total and have been using Mercury for about 5 years. Best bank ever, and I’ll happily shill them all day every day till more people try them out.
In short, just dodge the ban. I used the same name and address on both my accounts, so as long as you use a different card you have a decent chance of bypassing the ban.
Deepseek models seem as good and are like 20x cheaper for me.
Why not using some other coding IDE with OpenRouter? There you can also use the models. You can even switch models easily depending on your needs and spent.
There are OpenSource versions of CodeX.
For example:
* OpenCode: https://medium.com/codex/kickstart-opencode-with-openrouter-...
* CodeX with OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/coding-agents/codex-cli
Well at least you didn't submit an ID and selfie yet so you could make a new account right, the future is bright.
Strange, I managed to sign up with an email alias and pretty much always have my proton vpn turned on, never had any issues with Claude code or web - maybe I’m about to? :D
Been thinking of switching to a multi model harness anyway.
Thy're probably using their own AI to find violations. Go figure.
Just use one of the alternatives, there are so many. I recommend DeepSeek, GLM/Z-AI or Qwen. They are cheaper and offer competitive performance to Anthropic.
The part that would bother me most is not the ban itself, but having no idea what to change. “Policy violation” could mean VPN, billing risk, location, or actual usage.
Opencode, w. openrouter?
Kiro.dev, w. cerebras?
Aider, w. groq (with a Q)?
Don't have a solution but just to add that I'm the same boat, and I've seen a few others. Something trips their anomaly detection and they don't care about it because it's presumably a low false positive rate.
For what it's worth I can just pay for tokens through other providers proxying their API. Still sucks because you end up paying much more.
Lucky you.
Had my account banned 6 months ago. Created a new account and have continued with no issues since
Just generate a virtual credit card?
There's just a lot of fraud. My bank killed my debit card for "fraud" in my attempts to pay my anthropic bill which triggered fraud alerts, I confirmed the charge was legitimate and it got flagged again. Three times until they just deleted my card.
Very simple, just don't use it and switch to another model (e.g. a Chinese one).
Use grok build. They've got some pretty cool things going
Might not be a very popular advice or even what you're looking for, but I think Anthropic banning you (or any user for that matter) is a blessing in disguise. The sheer amount of compute resources consumed by their high reasoning "pondering..." and "bloviating..." tokens isn't sustainable at scale. Eventually, they must ban everyone but those with deep and infinite pockets in order for this model to be sustainable and turn revenues.
Computers and LLMs are great at automation of low-level human cognitive tasks like memory, decisions and loops, etc. but struggle enormously with high cognitive tasks like reasoning, deep logic, nuance, etc. Not that it can't be done (Claude platform is proof that it can) - but the cost and scaling advantage in this realm belongs to the human brain, not the LLM.