"I'm glad this happened with Anthropic instead of Google, which provides Gemini, email, etc. or I would have been locked out of the actually important non-AI services as well."

Non-disabled organization = the first party provider

Disabled organization = me

I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.

Tangential but you reminded me of why I don't give feedback to people I interview. It's a huge risk and you have very low benefit.

It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with.

I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all.

Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes.

God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies.

It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.

The excerpt you don’t understand is saying that if it has been Google rather than Anthropic, the blast radius of the no-explanation account nuking would have been much greater.

It’s written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people), but the reference is unmistakable.

> I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users

Right, but we're talking about a private isolated AI account. There is no sense of social interaction, collaboration, shared spaces, shared behaviors... Nothing. How can you have such an analogue here?

One Claude agent told other Claude agent via CLAUDE.md to do things certain way.

The way Claude did it triggered the ban - i.e. it used all caps which apparently triggers some kind of internal alert, Anthropic probably has some safeguards to prevent hacking/prompt injection and what the first Claude did to CLAUDE.md triggered this safeguard.

And it doesn't look like it was a proper use of the safeguard, they banned for no good reason.

This tracks with Anthropic, they are actively hostile to security researchers.

The author code have easily shared the last version of Claude.md that had the all caps or whatever, but didn't. Points to something fishy in my mind.

It wasn’t circular. TFA explains how the author was always in the loop. He had one Claude instance rewrite the CLAUDE.MD of another Claude instance whenever the second one made a mistake, but relaying the mistake to the first instance (after recognizing it in the first place) was done manually by the author.

What is wrong with circular prompt injection?

The "disabled organization" looks like a sarcastic comment on the crappy error code the author got when banned.

i have no idea what he was actually doing either, and what exactly is it one isnt allowed to use claude to do?

[flagged]

More likely explanation: Their account was closed for some other reason, but it went into effect as they were trying this. They assumed the last thing they were doing triggered the ban.

I don't understand how having two separate instances of Claude helps here. I can understand using multiple Claude instances to work in parallel but in this case, it seems all this process is linear...

I often ask Claude to update Claude.md and skills..... and sometimes I'll just do that in a new window while my main window is busy and I have time.

Wonder if this is close to triggering a warning? I only ever run in the same codebase, so maybe ok?

Which shouldn't be bannable imo. Rate throttle is a more reasonable response. But Anthropic didn't reply to the author, so we don't even know if it's the real reason they got banned.

> When you write in all caps, it triggers sort of a alert at Anthropic

I find this confusing. Why would writing in all caps trigger an alert? What danger does caps incur? Does writing in caps make a prompt injection more likely to succeed?

Wait what? Really? All caps is a bannable offense? That should be in all caps, pardon me, in the terms of use if that's the case. Even more so since there's no support at the highest price point.

They probably organize individual accounts the same as organization accounts for larger groups of users at the same company internally since it all rolls up to one billing. That's my first pass guess at least.

> Author is not an organization, they had an account with anthropic which got disabled and Anthropic addressed them as organization.

Anthropic accounts are always associated with an organization; for personal accounts the Organization and User name are identical. If you have an Anthropic API account, you can verify this in the Settings pane of the Dashboard (or even just look at the profile button which shows the org and account name.)

Sounds like author of the post might have needed an AI to review and fix his convoluted writing. Maybe even two AIs!