| ▲ | Tell HN: Using Anthropic is risky. They just banned our company without warning |
| 19 points by ent101 4 days ago | 26 comments |
| This is as old as time now. We get banned by these massive operations and we have no recourse but to cry for help on HN. Anthropic just banned my company without warning[1] leaving thousands of users high and dry. The only way to contact them is by filling out a Google Form. Has anybody had any experience with this situation? I'd appreciate any help. [1] https://x.com/NariBuildsStuff/status/1859759476133491051 |
|
| ▲ | airbreather 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is why the "cloud" model of AI is not really where I would want to be as a business. Admittedly you are not going to get the same cutting edge performance, but I would only be basing a business on an AI I could download and run on my own hardware, such that at least current performance could be guaranteed going forward. Anytime you buy anything as a service, you are in danger that due to malice, incompetence, lack of profitability, competing with a greater or established interest, or many other reasons, that service may become unavailable at little to no notice. I don't understand why companies put themselves at these risks, when it comes to software as a service components to their business, when they wouldn't dream of exposing themselves to similar risks in any other domain related to their well being. |
| |
| ▲ | ndjdjddjsjj a day ago | parent [-] | | If you use it SaaS style and if you choose Llama or similar you are good. You can run it anywhere you can run a GPU. It is like using Linux on AWS. You get banned you can use Azure. |
|
|
| ▲ | bigfatkitten 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The moral of this story: If your business relies on another business to provide a service, you either need an iron clad guarantee that they will continue to do so, or you need a plan B for when they don't. |
| |
| ▲ | ent101 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think the moral of the story is to not use Anthropic, specifically. xAI and OpenAI are working just fine. Anthropic is giving me very strong Google vibes were they will nuke you for no reason and no recourse. | | |
| ▲ | muzani 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | OpenAI has done this too. xAI is a part of X, which bans people without notice as well. All of these companies are greatly understaffed, or rather, moderation can't keep up with demand. | |
| ▲ | codingdave 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > ...are working just fine. Every vendor under the sun is working just fine, right up until it isn't. Any business model that is 100% dependent on a vendor - any vendor - has a major risk that needs a backup plan. | |
| ▲ | tomcam 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hasn't OpenAI broken some of its foundational promises? |
|
|
|
| ▲ | tmaly 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can you not use the AWS Bedrock and still use the Anthropic models there without having to deal directly with them? |
|
| ▲ | talldayo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > we have no recourse but to cry for help on HN. HN doesn't wave a magic wand and make problems go away. You solve this by not building a business on an arbitrary service that can be revoked at-will by the provider. This isn't an "Anthropic is risky" problem - this is a "don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms" problem: https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast... |
| |
| ▲ | fragmede 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's too simplistic to be
useful. There are plenty of small businesses to be had grooming other people's castles in other people's kingdoms. Groundskeeper, for instance. While we'd all like to be the next Google or OpenAI, not everybody has that kind of opportunity, and it should just be recognized as a business risk, like any other. Entrepreneurship has risks. That's the entire premise of it. If it were a sure thing, everyone would just do that. The problem is that you simply can't avoid every possible kingdom and you'll waste more time if you build everything from scratch. QuickBooks could kick you off their system, but unless you're a Fintech company, reinventing that wheel, and finding a bookkeeper who will work with your custom bookkeeping software is just not reasonable for every single facet of your business. So build your castle in Anthropic's kingdom, write your code in such a way that you can swap out for OpenAI or Llama in a couple of hours/days. Know which kingdoms are likely to kick you out and which ones aren't. If your company is built in the kingdom of the USA, what's the business continuity plans if the US dollar collapses? Do you have one? Why is that such a ridiculous question when, in terms of building in someone else's kingdom, that's probably the most real "kingdom" some of us live in? | | |
| ▲ | authorfly 3 days ago | parent [-] | | In regard to your Kingdom question, no. - Humans are always peer relative, no exception. If everyone around you is affected by the same thing, it doesn't affect you as much. It doesn't affect your chances to marry, have children or gain status, which tend to drive a lot of people (look at mimetic competition). When interest rates go up, it exposes the 10-15% of the population who were heavily debted, but the majority do fine, moan together, and move on, saving more cautiously. So it does make a difference. Online Kingdoms are transient and flipping a switch; information advantages are more abound. That is not so true offline - the people you meet in person are roughly speaking, going through the same challenges on a macro economic scale as you. People here rightly have an issue with the fact that technology is allowing consolidation and reducing the number of entrepreneurship options which have no fundamental reliance on a platform entity. Even though the rise of online sellers (Etsy, Ebay etc) has made the number of self-employed people or company directors rise on paper, it had not kept up with increases in population, and there are far less self-employed people earning a wage above the median salary wage than there were in say the year 2000. If you look at Microconf stats you will see that today the majority of entrepreneurs are earning similar amounts to employees; once you adjust for skill difference (entrepreneurs tend to have higher market value than the average employee), you can see something is going a little awry in the economy. I agree with your point you'd waste too much time building from scratch. However, generally the bar for businesses and software has risen; I think this is because whereas in 2000 you might spend 50% of your time working with polished products from big companies, today you spend 80-90% of your time in Google Docs/Instagram. A single bug or slow load in that remaining 10% makes you quickly search for an alternate solution. But the fact building on existing platforms can abate the problem of delivering high quality value to the customer does not remove the risk it introduces to rely on a specific platform with arbitrary or non-existent customer support. Back in the 2000s for example, people actually believed that technology would enable more global competition and more distributed business. So it's curious that it has turned on it's head. Furthermore there is reason to be personally optimistic: over the course of their lifetimes, most people reach at least the top 30th income percentile for 10 years or more. In other words, with more experience and skill, most people earn enough to save money, and this applies across almost all demographics. Income correlates far more with age than basically anything else. Which is great because if you feel rubbish now in your 20s, your upwards potential is massive. It doesn't matter if in 20 years the dollar has collapsed, your income will likely be in the top 30-40%, and that will give you a significant edge in the economy, whatever it is relatively like for your peers. | | |
| |
| ▲ | ent101 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | hopefully, my mistake will serve as a warning to other developers not to trust these services where things could be taken down arbitrarily! Even though it's happened countless times before. | |
| ▲ | uberman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | So dont build a business based in a cloud? | | |
| ▲ | muzani 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It's about reputation. AWS has a solid rep. Google less so but it's still there. Alicloud even less. And there's still lots of small private clouds, the kind who will random your domain name after it expires. The top AI companies are all bottom tier in reliability, it's practically the wild west. They'll expire your credits. You can't contact support. Sometimes you'll not get what you paid for and the helpful forum mods will ask if you logged into the wrong account. | | |
| ▲ | uberman 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I have to disagree. It is not about reputation. No service company has a reputation any more. I can't think of a single company that after a dispute about closing an account promptly said "Oh ya a real person looked at this immediately and it is clear that we made a mistake. We are so sorry and I'll put a flag on your account preventing this from ever happening again". The best we have is counter social spaces where people in the know can post to a place like this and hope either that they reach an insider at the company or that a media firestorm erupts and the company is shamed into doing the right thing. This is the current example that infuriates me: Would you agree that Chase has a rather good reputation for a brick and mortar bank? [10-Year-Old Makes More Than $2K Selling Chickens, but the Bank Keeps Her Money for Over a Year](https://people.com/10-year-old-makes-usd2k-selling-chickens-...) Chase closed her account and stole her money just because they could and no amount of customer service could fix it. No amount of evidence. Then only way it was resolved is from news shaming Chase. That is where we are today. |
| |
| ▲ | mouse_ 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Don't build a business in -someone else's- cloud. That's unfortunately how the logic follows, yes. Of course there are variables. For example, AWS has a lot to lose if they start pulling things like this. Independence requires acting independently. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | 1123581321 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's frustrating. I'm not saying you did anything wrong, but I wouldn't rely on any of these companies without talking to a human first. That's because they are still figuring out what acceptable use looks like, let alone how to describe it to customers, build dispute mechanisms etc. We use an Anthropic competitor and made sure we had a responsive account rep before committing to anything, and we're still rolling out in phases. We're moving quickly but we're not startup speed, so we have more time and margin to have those conversations. |
|
| ▲ | readyplayernull 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Anthropic is receiving large investments from Amazon, so it wouldn't surprise me whether they are "optimizing" their business model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215126 |
|
| ▲ | elmerfud 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The typical responses you'll get here are summed to as "sucks to be you". The attitude of allowing larges places to have opaque processes for termination of a business relationship is staunchly defended here. To the point that you have no idea if it was even legally allowed for them to terminate the relationship. Just because you're a business doesn't mean you can absolutely refuse service for any reason at all. I also find it kind of funny that the same people would largely not grant the same rights to someone who refuses to decorate a cake in Colorado. Even though there's likely hundreds of other cake shops and decorators they could go to. This is one of those situations where most people will never care or they will blame you until it happens to them. This is absolutely something we need the legislation or at least the FTC to be involved with to greatly curtail these terms of service based things. Especially if you're in a business to business relationship this should be governed by a contract and not a one-sided terms of service which may or may not be legal and you had zero negotiating power in. With a contract there is actual specific provisions and methods required to terminate the contract early. Those things must be documented and defensible but terms of service is just good luck. The most laughable but also the most common argument in defense of these one-sided terms of service that I see from hacker news people is if they tell you exactly what you did wrong and gave you a chance to remediate it then you could work the system and not do that anymore. I thought that was the whole idea if you know absolutely what is right and what is wrong you can avoid doing what is wrong. But apparently having a guessing game what is appropriate and why it is appropriate and what is not and why it's not is par for the course for the vast majority of hacker news people. Is this a business or is this a dating relationship? |
| |
| ▲ | talldayo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > I also find it kind of funny that the same people would largely not grant the same rights to someone who refuses to decorate a cake in Colorado. When was the last time you bought a cake from a shop that made you sign an EULA? I don't think many people would visit a bakery that has an "arbitrary cake termination" clause, because most people smell something suspicious when they have to agree to terms before shopping somewhere. Not on the internet, though. | | |
| ▲ | elmerfud 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The analogy is the right to refuse service to anyone anytime for any reason which is what these terms of services do because you have no way of knowing if the company is honoring their side. | | |
| ▲ | talldayo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Yep. And fool you are, you click on the "agree" button even when the success and reputation of your business relies on it. | | |
| ▲ | elmerfud 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Tell me, how else do you currently do business without agreeing? You are the fool to think you can engage in anything without some tos involved. This is why consumer protections need to be put in place. | | |
| ▲ | talldayo 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Tell me, how else do you currently do business without agreeing? By not engaging in business with services I don't trust? I'm not being held at gunpoint to sign the Sephora TOS, it's my conscious decision to ignore the terms and click anyways. > This is why consumer protections need to be put in place. Look - I agree. But asking for consumer protections in America is like asking for a glass of ice water in hell. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | vednig 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| That's why rule one of Reliable Software keep Dependencies Low |
