[otterley]

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?

[rv64imafdc]

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.

[loloquwowndueo]

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)

[teiferer]

> was too dumb to review

Yolo ship it! Move fast and break things. Reviewing just slows everybody down. Nobody can keep up with those coding agents output any longer.

/s

[rohansood15]

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.

[jonahx]

Regardless of your expectations (I'm not criticizing them), that is just not how it works at most American companies. Especially not for your manager.

[rohansood15]

You're right. They'd prefer to fire 7% of their team that did nothing wrong instead.

[sumeno]

Did Anthropic announce layoffs that I missed?

[skywhopper]

They will by next year.

[michaelmrose]

I would expect someone would be critiqued to avoid it re-occurring and the persons money to be refunded. A company which fires so trivially will quickly flush institutional knowledge and team cohesion along with eating substantial recruitment costs.

[colechristensen]

This is not how any engineering workplace anywhere operates.

[rohansood15]

There are more software engineers outside the first-world than there are within.

[reaperducer]

This is not how any engineering workplace anywhere operates.

Anywhere inside your bubble. The world is a big place.

[grayhatter]

> 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.

[throwaw12]

> 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?

[nickthegreek]

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

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

[otterley]

Last I heard, the money is being refunded.

[nickthegreek]

I do a see a tweet saying something about that, which I had to search for and only did because of your post. But remember, this only came about after denying him the refund first (while thanking him for the 'bug' and told they would fix the problem) and it going viral on HN and X.

I'm sure they will proactively reach out to everyone who was affected without any need on the users part and make everyone whole....

[subscribed]

Only because the issue got very public and it started to stink. Not because they scammed him.

[ceejayoz]

> How about we turn down the heat, everyone?

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

[otterley]

I agree that their support is abysmal, and that is intentional. It's unfortunate that the greater market doesn't seem to care that much right now.

[bad_haircut72]

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

[gjsman-1000]

Also they ain't wrong. In what other context does OpenClaw get mentioned?

"You may not use our service if you mention OpenClaw" is a harsh line but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction (i.e. no use allowed for high-stakes financial modeling). Don't like it, cancel your plan.

[rv64imafdc]

> is a harsh line

But that's the thing -- there is no line! Where is this specified? How can we know what service restrictions there are? For all I know, my plan could be exhausted at any point during the workday just because I happened to touch on some keyword Anthropic has decided to ban.

> Don't like it, cancel your plan.

Ah, but I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity? That the arbitrary enclosure of the collective intelligence was for our own good? These concepts are not compatible.

[vel0city]

> I thought these models were supposed to have been trained for the sake of humanity?

Tbh blocking OpenClaw might just be for the betterment of humanity. It's yet to be proven either way.

[gjsman-1000]

When you signed up, you agreed you understood the line - which is whatever Anthropic decides the line is. Legally, the line hasn't changed at all, nor has your moral position relative to Anthropic. Don't like it, cancel, but it was always the deal.

This is, by the way, the same legal principle that the website you are posting on, right now, uses. Some uses are prohibited. Not every line need be explicit. You aren't allowed to smack talk Y Combinator or the moderators without possibly being banned for life, and you certainly do not have a legal case if they do.

[StilesCrisis]

Do you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason?

People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.

[bachmeier]

> Do you think businesses are allowed to just take your money, laugh, and refuse service for no reason?

> People spend large sums of money for this tool. They can't just delete your balance because they feel like it.

Unfortunately, in the US, they can. I'm not a lawyer working in this area, but my understanding is that companies are in general free to stop doing business with any customer at any time (other than reasons like the race of the customer). And in this type of transaction, there is no obligation to give a refund when they cut off the business relationship. This is different from a business-to-business contract or other types of contracts. This type of sale you're generally out of luck if the business cuts you off. That's why Amazon can delete the music library they sold you and give you no compensation.

[echoangle]

If you’re paying for it, they can’t just arbitrarily deny you service for made up reasons. I would cancel, but then I would also charge back my payment I’m not getting my promised service for.

[otterley]

Sure they can. But they have to refund your money.

[macNchz]

There are plenty of ways you could wind up with a git commit containing "OpenClaw" despite zero interaction with OpenClaw itself...adding a blog post to a static site repo, or even a clause in your own app's ToS disallowing use of OpenClaw with your API.

[teiferer]

Somebody elses repo that you cloned can contain lots of fun things.

[grayhatter]

> but hardly illegal or forbidden any more than any other service restriction

Intentionally (or negligently) anti-competitive behavior is illegal in the US.

> Don't like it, cancel your plan.

Don't like being abused by a company? Just pretend it's not happening! Anyone else exactly as smart as you were, they deserve to be cheated out of their money too!

[Dylan16807]

There's a lot of people making tools for coding with LLMs and those have a high chance of mentioning OpenClaw somewhere.

[skywhopper]

Where is this restriction documented?

[Jcampuzano2]

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.

[verdverm]

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.

[NetOpWibby]

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

[subscribed]

Looking at the investigation details this is not a mistake.

And I am a engineer by trade and if I made an actual mistake costing our customer real money, this would be refunded by the company. My company wouldn't say "oh yeah, our bad, f* off"

And I'm certain I didn't caused any bugs like this.

[skywhopper]

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.

[teiferer]

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.

[surgical_fire]

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.