> Author here. For seven months I've been handing every consumer dispute to a Claude agent instead of eating the cost like I normally would. It builds the case file, pulls the warranty or policy text and the terms of service, works out who actually regulates the company, and plans a "campaign" with fallbacks. Ten unrelated fights (IRS penalties, a car warranty, two insurance denials, a robot mop, grocery stuff), yielded just over $12k back! The biggest single one was an IRS first-time penalty abatement I'd never heard of, $6.8k, eight years into an installment plan.

> To be honest, the agent's first-pass advice is usually bad ("file an FTC complaint"); what works is multi-prong approach until something moves. For the robo-mop it ended up all the way at their own arbitration clause, whose consumer fee rules cost them several times the refund. For the pet insurer it was the state regulator plus two exec emails, and they relented in hours after two months of stonewalling.

> Companies rely on a drop-off funnel, and an agent with infinite patience breaks it - thats the story.

It's flagged and dead but good advice. I've used it a lot for legal disputes (basic contracts).

It helps to make your argument, then have AI steelman a rebuttal, then modify your argument to smash their steelman. Then your initial outreach is your stage 2 argument that bypasses all plausible initial denials.