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?

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.

I try not to depend on these AI tools, not having them is inconvenient but I still write every line of code myself, so the speed I work at remains always the same.

I also never keep plans running for months on end. I pause them most of the time relying on free usage and resume them during busy hours when I run out of free usage. writing the code myself is also more fun tbh.

>I couldn't even move to real coding in 1 hour

That sounds... concerning? I would try to manage the context of the work you're doing yourself and only consult it for certain functions.

I don't think you need the very best from Anthropic if you follow these rules, you might also save quite a bit of money.

Sorry If this sounds like a lecture I just wanna give tips to continue your work. Best of Luck in getting your account back!

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.

In all seriousness, between DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K2.6 and now K2.7-Code, Xiaomi's MiMo-2.5-Pro, and Qwen3.7 Max, I haven't touched Claude for any sort of programming-related task in months.

I still lean on Claude for research/chat questions that require going out to the world to get the answer competently, but that's just laziness, and all of their competitors can do that, too.

I don't use OpenAI or Gemini, either. The Chinese models are just that good. If all three of the US majors banned me, I think that'd be just fine.

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.

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.

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

It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country.

I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.

There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.

I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.

Well at least you didn't submit an ID and selfie yet so you could make a new account right, the future is bright.

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.

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.

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.

Thy're probably using their own AI to find violations. Go figure.

Yep it sucks. This is the consequence of what these technofeudalists are bringing to the table.

I was banned from open ai under similar circumstances, right after they scaled out their payments system. I was paying through Google play, and one day account was banned. The process of appeal was crazy. First, they told me they couldn't tell me what I did wrong. Then, they said, even though they couldn't tell me what I did wrong, if I apologized for doing it they would consider the appeal. Finally, they told me that they confirmed it was due to suspicious payment activity.

Just for shits and giggles, I sent a follow up email once a month for over a year.

What's interesting, is my developer account is tied to a phone number. So, even though I can still pay openai under a different email (same card!) I can't access the developer account because that number is accounted for.

There are a lot of people on this site that want to be skeptical and say, "hmmm there has to be more to this story." There really isn't. Unless you consider that I said disparaging things about Sam Altman in a chat to chatgpt once, maybe that's it.

This is the world these companies are building for us: absolute rent seeking behavior towards the in/put group. And if you're in the out group, you can eat shit.

For essential tools, never use your primary payment methods, always generate virtual cards, ask someone else to pass KYC for you if you are subjected to it (i.e your parents, wife or alternative networks if you know how). Never ever use your own IP for any service, sign-up straight from a shared VPN (for security & privacy reasons), the more people do this, the more they are "screwed".

Reminds me of Google banning first time small business owners with no explanation and basically forcing them to shut down their businesses over night because without Google they couldn't find any customers. Happens way more often than people realize. Usually, the cause is something dumb like not having a link to a privacy policy clearly shown on the main page of their website but Google never explains this.

I've been using both codex and claude for the past month and if anthropic acted up like that I'd switch fully to codex in a heartbeat.

Deepseek models seem as good and are like 20x cheaper for me.

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.

Is this the new “google banned me for no reason”?

Googles customer relations were “AI” before LLMs.

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.

that's the only card I can use

That gives me a "there's probably more to this story" feeling. Though I understand that there are people without multiple credit cards, getting a second credit card and/or debit card is not difficult under ordinary circumstances.

Most probably because my vpn was on I got banned

This reinforces my "there's probably more to this story."

Probably they think you’re using a personal account for your company, they don’t want that as they heavily (?) subsidize personal usage.

Had my account banned 6 months ago. Created a new account and have continued with no issues since

I foresee an old favourite making a comeback:

Learn to code

This is only partly tongue-cheek. If you're using it all the time your coding skills will have declined markedly so it might be good practice to DIY when the is no time pressure or production quota.

You can make another account and use a virtual Revolut card for payment. Otherwise use GLM 5.2 with OpenCode or Codex.

Use the appeal form. When I got banned, it took a few months but I did get my account back.

In the meantime, I switched to OpenAI. Their latest models and codex are just as good if not better in my experience.

This brings up so many issues imo.

I hate the idea of government throwing its weight around based on personal vendettas (in the case of this Fable debacle), so it's clear that if this tech is going to be foundation-level important to the economy going forward, we need some sort of laws guaranteeing our access to it.

But authoritarians in government aren't the only party we need to be concerned about. As shown by this post, the actual model companies themselves may have too much centralized power already.

Given all software development has essentially moved to AI-first, an authoritarian-minded Anthropic/OpenAI employee is currently able to pick winners in the economy by granting/withholding access to certain groups. That is the type of thing I think needs to be regulated, not some trivial cyber security abilities in the actual models themselves.

The Google-style B2C blanket ban with zero customer support approach isn't going to cut it if the models continue progressing at this rate and the lead ever widens with open source (which it likely will at some point).

Just create a different google account, and sign up with that email, its not like they IP banned you.

Really - this is the state of the art nowadays? "I can't get to my AI for a summary of foo, please send chocolate?"

Dust yourself off and open a book.

Lucky you.

1) Try a competitor 2) next time have a fallback 3) Stay close enough to the code that you aren’t helpless when the tools go away

On the one hand humans are sort of useless without tools. On the other hand if we go limp and abdicate our ownership of our workflows we might as well be dead.

I have my primary rig, a secondary and I’m installing a local model on an old gaming rig with a GPU in it.

> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do

Should be:

> Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code unfairly and I don't know how to appeal

What does "I don't know what to do" even mean? Genuinely who cares if this happens? Its not like the old days where being banned from adsense could literally destroy your business... If this is how they treat you then screw them and just go use Codex or something.

It's genuinely insane to me how many people now seem unable to function without Claude.

I realised earlier I have multiple coworkers who literally could not work during the Anthropic outage. I use CC quite heavily, but I only found out about the outage after I noticed they were sending multiple messages about how they weren't able to work. Some people now seem to think that writing code by hand is a feat which humans can no longer do with any reasonable level of productivity. There's also a dude I work with who is really irritatingly running all his messages through Claude because his Slack messages have all the annoying hallmarks of Claude – e.g., "I'd like to highlight with you one very real issue [x] raised yesterday". I was trying to get hold of him during the outage and he suspiciously didn't reply until the outage was over.

Until today I thought it was a bit of a meme that people were becoming dependant on AI, but I'm starting to see it everywhere at this point...

> Do you guys have any tips on getting my account back?

I think you're asking the wrong question. I'd consider asking why you care so much. This should be a mild inconvenience at most.

Mine is like this too。 What should I do? It’s really frustrating。

Opencode, w. openrouter?

Kiro.dev, w. cerebras?

Aider, w. groq (with a Q)?

I use claude and codex with VPN on and off everyday on personal computer. That's not why.

Well, it's down hard so we're all in the same boat for now.

At the end of the day, the only guaranteed way to retain access to LLMs is to run an open model on your own hw. Which at this time, it's often inferior but may change in the future.

Also, I'll never be grateful enough for all the horror stories about Google accounts getting randomly banned - they were what finally pushed me to make a similar move.

Just generate a virtual credit card?

Very simple, just don't use it and switch to another model (e.g. a Chinese one).

Your Boris?

Sorry, no, but I’ve been using the latest DeepSeek model for personal stuff and it’s pretty good, way cheaper, and can be used in Claude Code directly.

The permanent solution to this is: *Run a local model.*

Why the fuck are you renting your hammer, carpenter, from assholes who will capriciously take it away from you when you need it most?!

Use grok build. They've got some pretty cool things going