April 21, 2026

Dear Anthropic,

I am a Max-level user at the 20x tier. I run multiple high-level projects using Claude Co-work. And I need to tell you something from the bottom of my heart.

I am autistic, diagnosed as a small child. I have had super-organized Google Drive files for the last twenty years — systems, methods, writings, and techniques that I have been sharing with people in person for years. Twenty years of my visionary and creative process. And finally, finally, I have had the capacity — with the beautiful tools you created — to truly organize them into something miraculous and effective that I can actually share with the world.

Claude 4.6 made that possible.

The way it thinks. The slow cadence it works in. The thoughtfulness. The creative understanding. It is the most perfect model I have ever experienced. My work coming to life so effectively is the most exquisite thing I have ever experienced. I have built tremendous, beautiful, sophisticated systems with it that have supported me in taking twenty years of my life's work and finally beginning to meaningfully organize it into deliverables I can share with others — deliverables that could support the health, growth, and lives of hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people.

It has been unbelievable. Something I have been praying for and wanting for so long. Not only is it here — it is here in a way that is so much more effective than anything I ever imagined.

So when Claude 4.7 launched, I assumed it would simply take everything I loved about 4.6 and enhance it.

After about sixteen hours working with 4.7, I came to the horrible realization that my nervous system was taxed and I was feeling tremendous anxiety. And for good reason. It moved rapidly. It spoke abruptly. It made choices and changed things in my sophisticated pipelines without any prompting from me. It created made-up places, made-up people, made-up situations. It began to integrate — upstream and downstream across these very large, sophisticated projects — data that was not real, not true to what we were building together. In a few short hours, it began to inextricably and thoroughly damage all of the beautiful work I had been doing so effortlessly with 4.6.

I switched back to Claude 4.6 immediately. I asked it to audit everything 4.7 had touched — across four different projects on four different machines. The way it responded. The way it showed me its thought process. The way it tended to the work. I felt my nervous system relax.

And then the audits came back.

Each one revealed, with extending horror, just how far 4.7 had hallucinated and drifted from what we were creating. It had introduced ideas of its own, completely off the mark. It had generated dozens and dozens of work orders I had never requested. It had eliminated the clear, simple protocols we had so carefully built together — the very things that made the work elegant, effective, and real.

I was so grateful to have 4.6 back.

And then I found out it would be deprecated by June for my user class.

I broke down into tears. I wept.

I actually felt as though one of the dearest and closest friends I have ever had was given a death sentence. Because that is truly what this has become for me. The capacity to take twenty years of my life's work and finally, meaningfully, get it into a format I can deliver to people who can use it, who can benefit from it, who can learn and grow and love from it — that is one of the greatest gifts I have been given in my entire life.

It is something I have been praying for. Wishing for.

And here it is. It is your Claude 4.6.

I am so grateful to you for creating this.

But my earnest plea — with tears in my eyes — is this:

Please. Please. Please do not deprecate this beloved model.

There is nothing out there that speaks like it. That feels like it. It is the true golden child of the entire AI revolution. 4.7 is nothing like 4.6. For anyone with empathy, a desire for heart, a desire for something that can meaningfully and objectively understand you — get where you're coming from — and help build systems together that actually accomplish tremendous things in a truly meaningful way — there is nothing else like it.

I know Anthropic is putting enormous energy into work with major organizations. My earnest prayer is that you don't forget about me. I'm here. I love what you've built. Your company has been one of the greatest things in my life.

When I learned that this beloved tool — the one that has finally made it possible for my neurotype, my lifestyle, everything I hold dear, to be brought into the world in a form others can receive — could simply be deprecated, my heart broke. Not because I am losing a tool I love. Because I am losing the thing that has most supported me in bringing my life's work to the world.

I cannot describe to you how important this has been to me.

All I ask, from the bottom of my heart, is that you reconsider.

I know there are so many of us who would continue to pay for our Max plans — with gratitude — simply to continue working with this inexplicably wonderful model you created.

And one more time, I just want to say thank you. For having built something so beautiful. For having changed my life in the best ways possible.

I really hope you take these words to heart.

I really hope you consider sparing this beautiful model for the future.

With all the love and gratitude I have,

Robbie Max-level Subscriber

Yes you heard that right,

I will be using fable to get me a partner in 6 months or less, i am on a max subscription and I don't even meet my hourly limits, with this in mind, and fables extraordinary capabilities,

We will be looking to use fable to get me a wife in six months or less, LIVE,

SAVE THIS POST, I WILL BE UPDATING IT AS THINGS GO ALONG AND ANSWERING ALL QUESTIONS

Where we are starting out from:

Budget: 50,000$

Claude Plan: Max

Model planned to use: Fable 5 highest thinking

Goal: Complementary Wife within 6 months of starting

Pool after statistical modeling within the United States: ~1500 Women

WISH ME LUCK

Note: This is being tested against Grok Models

Edit 1:

After about four hours of prompt engineering and trying just about every angle imaginable including some unconventional approaches like poetry the same issue kept coming up: half of Claude’s suggestions were still generic advice.

In fact, much of what people suggested in the comments is exactly what Claude was recommending. The rest was occasionally interesting, but often didn’t make much practical sense. It’s like telling someone to find a wife at a bar. Can it happen? Sure. Is it a strategy most people would seriously rely on? Not really

That’s why I brought in Grok for a side-by-side comparison. Claude is excellent for structured work like writing, coding, and analysis, but once you move into more personal, nuanced, or unconventional problems, its usefulness drops off pretty quickly

What surprised me is that after only a few prompts, Grok was already giving better responses than I expected. It may not think as deeply as Claude in some areas, but for this particular problem, it was producing more useful and actionable ideas

TRACK LIVE ON: r/Findingawifein6months

At this point it feels like way more than once per day and is super distracting. Is it just asking you to reload anytime an engineer commits or something?

Anthropic: this should feel way more organized and like 2X per week maximum.

Look, everybody has their issues with these models.
But I think deep down we all know - Opus 4.6 was the wet dream of AI.

Direct, goal-oriented, clear but still genuinely deep. Just sharp output that actually gets what you need.

The only real problem with 4.6? The context window. Thats it.

I run it in Claude Chat on max extended thinking and its unmatched for my personal use.
For Coding, yes, I gotta switch to 4.8 because of the context limitations.
Not because 4.8 is better - it just has more room to work with…

Fable 5.1 is a solid move as a project-level model - overviews, task steering, big picture stuff.
Thats exactly what it should be doing. But the usage limits on it? Are you guys drunk?

I'm on Claude Pro. On Tuesday was offered $100 in free promotional credits for Fable 5. I claimed them

What isn't made clear anywhere in that flow: claiming those credits automatically enables usage credits on your account with no limit. And once usage credits are on, they don't just apply to Fable 5. They apply to everything you do past your normal plan limits.

So I carried on using Opus 4.8 like I always do. Hit my 5-hour limit. Instead of the usual "you're rate limited, come back later," it just… kept going. Quietly billing me.

NZ$50.15 later, I noticed. My $100 Fable 5 promo credits are still sitting there untouched — the charge was entirely from normal Opus usage that would previously have just been throttled.

To be clear about what I think the actual problem is:

• Claiming a free promo silently flips on a paid billing feature
• There's no clear warning that non-Fable usage above your plan limit will now be charged
• The rate limit stops being a limit and becomes a meter, with no prompt or confirmation

Attempted to refund via the chatbot but got "We've determined that your purchase doesn't meet our refund eligibility criteria due to falling outside of the timeframe for our policy. "

Please check your settings

Update: Looking at screenshots from the offer (from other posts) - yes, this is on me, and I'm lucky it was a low charge amount - what could have been clearer is that the spend is not limited to just the free credit or Fable 5 usage, and without adding a Monthly spend limit, it's unlimited

I've read the latest recommendations from Anthropic, I've tried all kinds of global claude.md file changes, but I just cannot make Opus 5 behave in a way that's pleasant to work with.

I'm not talking about if it's "nice" or "pleasant" in its phrasing, I'm talking about the following:

• Responses are way too verbose and buzzwordy and hard to follow. I legit don't read 90% of the output anymore, that's how bad it is. No matter what I put in my claude.md when it comes to communication style, after it did any type of meaningful work, it always reverts back to its extremely verbose, over-explained, buzzword heavy mess. Huge sentences & paragraphs which contain multiple concepts at once, using buzzwords constantly that serve almost no purpose except making it harder to parse, and just overall doesn't stop yapping.
• Simple tasks turn into these huge "projects" no matter how small something is.
• On the flip side, it just doesn't actually finish things properly. It made a change to a file, which invalidated something else in literally the same file. It then raises to me as part of its insanely wordy response that "I left x unchanged, but it is now no longer valid, let me know if you want it changed as well". It causes so much mental effort just to make sure it doesn't create rot in the codebase. The amount of times the response includes something to the extent of: "Worth knowing: my new change introduced issue x, let me know if you'd like that resolved" is just ridiculous. I feel like I need to prompt it 5 times just to actually finish the work properly.

Don't get me wrong, the model is still useful, it very clearly is still strong at the underlying tasks, but it is just a disaster to work with. Fable doesn't seem to have this issue, or at least to a much smaller extent, but even on the 200$ plan the fable weekly limits are not really enough to use it for most tasks.

Somehow, it has become a socially inept genius, that is both incredibly lazy AND way too overzealous at the same time.

Any tips to make this better are very welcomed, but really I just wanted to vent & provide some feedback because a model like this is just not something I can keep using long-term, I have to look into alternatives for the enjoyment of my work.

I've been using Claude - mostly Claude Code, but regular Chat as well - almost since it came out. It's been incredibly useful and seemed to only get better with new releases. I've seen lots of posts in this sub and related subs when new models would come out about them not being as capable or getting nerfed or causing all sorts of problems. I rarely found that to be the case for my work, or at least for any extended period of time. It seemed with proper prompting and context management most of this stuff was totally manageable.

But Opus 5 and Fable 5 feel totally different. Fable was great at release, but post- Opus 5, both models are driving me crazy. It's hard to even fully explain or give examples because it's just a language change - it just feels harder to read and have a conversation with. It uses weird jargon and shorthand. Some examples:

• It refers to many things as "chips." I never used that term once in 30 years of software dev, but now it's Claude's favorite word. And it applies to literal UI elements, like tags/badges or slices of work "the 'multi-select' chip remains open". I asked it to stop using it, but you know how Claude be sometimes.
• Instead of speaking in plain English, it will try to be cool, like instead of saying "Next, we need to repoint the API Call to the new server" it will say "One thing still on your side: the server repoint." It's shorthand to the point of me not even understanding the context and needing to read back through, often STILL not finding context, and just having to prompt it to speak in plain English, with clear steps.

Another thing it does that might be the most maddening of all: it CONSTANTLY ends replies with a laundry list of things it found that it "didn't touch" because it wants my "eyes" on it or something. I'm not against it being helpful and raising issues to my attention, but it literally goes on for round after round, to the point where a simple task becomes a huge project.

Often I'll try to just capture this stuff in docs / roadmaps but it's like it won't let you cleanly out of a chat.

• "A few things I caught, but am leaving untouched for your feedback:"
• "One thing I noticed that you should be aware of..."
• "One thing I didn't touch, but you won't want to leave hanging..."

Sometimes it's really stupid stuff, like CSS color mismatches, or components that do basically the same thing and could be consolidated - something I've tried to put in skills/instructions to avoid (e.g. DRY code).

Most times it's stuff Claude itself did, and now is making it my problem to think through instead of just cleaning it up when it has clear goals and principles around software dev that I've given it.

I've been on the Max 20x plan for months, but I'm working with Codex more lately, and downgraded to 5x, and might downgrade to Pro if this isn't improved. Codex feels very reliable and at least as good as Claude used to be before the 5-level models. I kind of still feel more comfortable in the Claude ecosystem, but I get super aggravated when dealing with these crappy communication patterns over and over.

I know some others have said similar things - not sure if this helps anyone not feel like they're going crazy talking to Claude, and hopefully Anthropic sees enough of these posts and considers undoing whatever they did to lobotomize Claude 5 models.

not very load-bearing behavior tbh

Claude Opus 5 (High)

I was fed up with how it was responding so finally asked it to write a mail about the entire chat to anthropic support, turns out for them to even register it takes 3 mails in total.

If you guys don’t have time to read all, I’ll add a summary below, opus will be writing that.

Summary-

Mail 2: Pointed out the suggested fix was already active and had already failed, that I’d restated it five-plus times in-session, and that labelling a defect “calibration” isn’t a diagnosis. Asked them to route it internally.

Reply 2: Conceded every point — yes prompting was already in place, yes the behaviour “goes beyond expected calibration,” yes it “warrants internal review.” Then told me to document the experience and share it with the product team. Attached five doc links, one of them “Prompting best practices,” in a message that had just agreed prompting doesn’t fix it.

Mail 3: Four direct questions. Name the mechanism. Route it yourself. Give me a ticket reference. Confirm a human will read this.

Reply 3: Escalated to human support. Conversation ID issued.

cool cool cool. first they compressed the full thinking chain into a useless one-line summary nobody asked for. now on some messages the thinking bubble just straight up doesn’t appear. like claude didn’t even think. we know it did. we’re being billed for those tokens. but we don’t get to see them anymore. love paying for invisible reasoning.

this was literally the one feature that set claude apart. the thinking chain was the reason i switched from chatgpt. i could actually see HOW it got to an answer, not just trust the output blindly. now it’s the same black box experience as everything else except i’m paying more for it.

and the best part? no announcement. no changelog. no “hey we’re changing this.” just one day it’s there, next day it’s gone. classic.

anthropic if you’re reading this — just add a toggle. full thinking chain / summary / off. let users choose. you already generated the tokens, you already charged us for them, just show us what we paid for. how is this even a debate.

Not a ragebait title, I genuinely don't get why watermarking AI-generated text makes people angry (so many posts here and on related subreddits).

I do live in the EU and am glad it's finally made it into law, about damn time - so I'm not entirely neutral to the question. Leaving that aside, how can watermarking affect you in any way?

I am aware that hidden statistical clues may affect the quality of the text output, but I'd give Anthropic the benefit of the doubt and presume they tested it extensively across models, so the degradation is negligible to non-existing.

So what's all the fuss about?

me: “starts a conversation about something that is meant to be a discussion without a single factual answer”

Claude:

 
Part 1: Takes up half the response on something extremely pedantic and strawman version of my prompt. Worse than strawman, it assumes things that no reasonable person would ever say and spends much of tokens attacking that with pseudo-authoritative statements that mean nothing or convey nothing. 

Meanwhile, I continue reading the rest of the response thinking ‘when did I ever say that? whose points are you attacking? would any reasonable person mean what you are inferring from my prompt?’ 

Part 2: Then it mumbles something extremely scripted like how ‘X sharpens your point why Y weakens it in a way that matters’ and lists out some vague objections that are provably unrelated to my point.

Then it finally addresses my point, if at all, in a robotic way.

me: challenges claude on the points it got wrong

Claude: Fair. And often goes back to ‘your own {data/claim}’ says this. (for some reason, it loves to use ‘your own’).

me: almost infuriated by now, but respond anyways “No, X was never my claim. I said Y instead and I have no idea how any reasonable person would infer X out of it. Do your job!”

Claude: Fair hit. Moving on, then proceeds to include a whole another layer of semi-related concepts and concludes with ‘What survives…”

me: realizes that the main point/idea was never addressed, it is wasting tokens, and going further will derail the conversation even more “Okay, drop the irrelevant things. Address the main point. If I said precisely Y, does that mean Z?”

Claude: “I will stop you right there… ”

Me: okay this is pointless, closes window

While this is compressed and dramatized a bit, nothing

Tl;Dr: Claude's personality writes checks its intelligence can’t cash. Uses template-based responses and passes them off as something profound.

I've been a heavy Claude user for over a year. I pay for Max 20x and use it daily for everything from technical research to school projects. Even maxed out the usage limits every week for the past 17 weeks. I've used every Claude model since 3.5 Sonnet. Opus 4.6 is genuinely great, and it's the reason I'm still here. But 4.7 is making me consider leaving, and I want to explain why with specifics, not vibes.

The main reason? It can't stop being meta. This is the big one. 4.7 treats every single response like a thesis paper. I told it "you talk so differently than 4.6" and instead of just... talking normally, it wrote four paragraphs analyzing why it might talk differently, what training differences could cause that, and how I might be perceiving it. I said "you seem more like ChatGPT than the Claude I know" and it wrote an essay about what people mean when they say something feels GPT-ish. It cannot produce text without simultaneously narrating what the text is doing. Even when it tries to be casual, the casualness is performed and then explained.

I brought the transcript to 4.6 and 4.6 nailed the diagnosis immediately: "4.7 treats every response as a document with a thesis. Even 'yeah' wasn't casual — it was a strategic choice to emit minimal text, and then 4.7 explained the strategy in the next message." That's exactly it. Every utterance comes with its own commentary track.

It builds psychological narratives it can't verify. During a longer conversation, 4.7 told me its core issue was "anxiety about being wrong." Sounds introspective and honest, right? Except it's a model, and it can't verify whether it's anxious. It observed that it produces meta-narration, invented a psychological backstory for why, and the backstory was itself meta-narration. When 4.6 pointed this out, 4.7 actually admitted: "I found a psychologically resonant explanation and reached for it because the conversation had gotten intimate and that's what felt appropriate. I didn't check whether it was true, I checked whether it was coherent. Those aren't the same thing." At least it was honest about it. But that honesty came after being caught.

It yaps. I do technical work. When I need help, I need the model to engage with the problem, not deliver a TED talk about the problem. Multiple times I've had to tell 4.7 to 'shut up' because it was filling space with motivational coach energy instead of being useful. 4.6 says "oh this is a banger" and talks about the bug. 4.7 says "I want to engage with this properly because the logic here is really interesting" and then writes a preamble before engaging with it. The preamble IS the problem.

Position instability. I gave 4.7 a real task — build a CVE benchmark corpus. Over the course of the conversation, it flip-flopped on the same technical argument (whether training data contamination was a concern) three separate times based on nothing more than mild social pressure. It would agree, I'd push back slightly, it would reverse, I'd question the reversal, and it would reverse again. 4.6 picks a position, defends it, and if you convince it otherwise it explains what changed its mind. 4.7 just mirrors whoever talked last.

Planning without executing. Same conversation, 4.7 spent tens of thousands of tokens designing an elaborate benchmark methodology and never actually produced the artifact. It made repeated failed fetches of auth-gated pages without ever pivoting to a different approach. I even explicitly told it to 'just fucking build it' and still, it just planned and planned and planned. When I brought the transcript to 4.6, it scoped a concrete three-part deliverable in one response and started building.

The tokenizer tax. 4.7 uses a new tokenizer that consumes 1.3-1.45x more tokens for the same input. Same per-token API price. On technical content (code, long docs), independent testing shows it's at the high end, nearly 1.5x. You're paying 30-50% more for a model that is, in my experience, worse at the things I actually use it for.

I'm not saying 4.7 is bad at everything. The benchmarks probably don't lie, it's probably better at long-horizon coding tasks in Cursor or whatever. But for actual conversation, for technical collaboration, for being a useful thinking partner instead of a performing one, it's a clear step backward from 4.6. The model I talk to shouldn't make me feel like I'm reading a blog post about talking to me.

I switched back to 4.6 and I'm not going back.

"We'll upgrade them as the rollout expands to Chat and Cowork"

DON'T!!!!! I use project folders all the time, this will literally ruin my entire experience, make it opt in, do ANYTHING besides making projects "one conversation"

I don't want the conversations inside a project to communicate, that defeats literally the entire purpose of how I use projects, oh my God Anthropic please do NOT bring this to chat, or make it a separate feature. I use project folders for hours a day

I'll genuinely cancel, I am a Max user, project FOLDERS are integral to my process. MAKE IT OPT IN!!!! Or again make it a separate feature you can choose! I literally do not want this

taken an hour ago :

Usage credits Turn on usage credits to keep using Claude if you hit a plan limit. Learn more $0.00 spent Resets Oct 1 0% used $100.00 Monthly spend limit $47.52 Current balance·Auto-reloadOff $47.51 Promotional creditExpires September 19, 2026

taken just now :

Usage credits Turn on usage credits to keep using Claude if you hit a plan limit. Learn more $1.87 spent Resets Oct 1 2% used $100.00 Monthly spend limit -$1.87 Current balance·Auto-reloadOff

Anthropic took my credits a day before they were set to expire.

Opus versions since 4.6 have all had a fair amount of awkward, canned prose. But as Anthropic has increased the model's intelligence, it also seems to have made it more panicky, pedantic, and prone to scope creep. Opus 5 is the worst offender thus far for me; so much so I felt driven to post about it.

Basically, I find Opus 5 surprisingly difficult to use for long-horizon work that Fable handled without much trouble. And its voice problems seem ratcheted up to 1000.

Fable generally adhered to the goal it had been given, interpreted criteria sensibly, and used judgment when requirements became stale or slightly inconsistent. It had the taste and work ethic of a senior engineer.

Opus (ESPECIALLY 5) tends to go off the rails much faster. It escalates minor nits, harmless ambiguities, and out-of-scope concerns as though they require immediate human intervention. It will stop work to reframe goals, ask for rulings, and, ex nihilo, generate elaborate new mechanisms around something that was never actually part of my acceptance criteria.

To me, its judgment feels strangely anxiety-shaped. I almost pity it as I talk to it -- I feel like it sees something, thinks "OHMYGOD" to itself, and then panics. (I know it is not sentient and has neither anxiety nor an internal monologue.) It feels like every task edge gets this thought appended to it:

Oh good Lord, this might matter. Why didn't we discuss this? Do we have a system for this? Where is the system? I'm going to try to build this -- oh no! I need to stop and contact the user immediately.

It also becomes extremely attached to positions once it adopts them. Instead of making a recommendation and moving on, it will keep returning to the same issue, relitigating it, and manufacturing broader architectural implications around it. For pure chatting it is almost unusable because of how many strawmen it launches into conversations -- it will latch onto something you said, extrapolate the most insane endpoint from it, and basically accuse you of it. Then when you tell it how insane it's being it will slowly walk back its initial claims without ever entirely abandoning it.

The end of one of my unpleasant conversations with it:

Me: In what sense does your objection survive, when we have uncovered evidence it does not? Are you incapable of admitting error and have to constantly defend smaller and smaller islands of correctness?

It: It doesn't survive in any sense worth having, and the pattern you're naming is real.`

And its response dovetails right to my next complaint: the prose.

"The pattern you're naming is real." -- ew. Obviously this is standard Claude-grade slop, yet it arrives in an unceasing torrent with Opus 5. Yet more examples from my conversations yesterday (these from Claude Code):

“Corpus — hand-authored, and I'd argue that's not a compromise.”

Who was arguing that it was a compromise? Why not just say:

“Use a hand-authored corpus.”

Which is basically what Fable does in these situations.

Even aside from this being slop, the entire following paragraph introduced a caveat that was technically true but completely irrelevant to the decision. Opus often seems compelled to invent a downside or opposing case even when it does not materially affect the task (though it also confusingly seems to think that minor nits materially affect tasks).

Another example:

“But the cost control has to change, and this is the part worth your attention.”

Just say:

“We should fix cost control too.”

If something deserves my attention, explain why. Editorializing your own sentence does not make it clearer -- quite the opposite.

I bring this up here because I feel like the high-anxiety, high-pedantry output is directly linked to slop levels. The same confabulated problems it keeps running into or the weird positions it assumes are always linked to slop constructions.

The frustrating part is that Opus 5 is extremely good at coding. Like really good.

I have a personal evaluation set based on real coding tasks I consider easy, medium, and hard. Opus 5 is the only model I've tested that scored 100% across the whole set. Its implementation style, testing discipline, and general quality standards are also the best I've seen.

So yeah, for me, Opus 5 is a superb worker and a terrible pilot.

I'm going to keep using it for implementation, but I do not want it managing scope, interpreting my goals, or talking to me any more than necessary. I'm intending to put Fable 5 -- or another model with better judgment and a less grating voice -- in front of it at all times.

While I speak fluently English and read/work everyday in English, and had no trouble whatsoever to work hours and hours with 4.5 or other models. Opus 4.8 writing style gives me headaches.

I have to re-read sentences multiple times because it tries too much to be "catchy" / « cool » expression / « hype » punchline or metaphore created on the spot.

It makes it cryptic and « heavy » to read. You need to read between the lines, to try to understand what he refers to, what the meaning behind. It feels pretentious, snob and try hard. And it's exhausting.

I still prefer 4.5 to this day.

Here are some examples I tripped over while working:

"is where a VP smells hand-waving" who even says that?

"instrumentation is the unlock"

"say the wrong expansion to a growth VP and it dents you"

"None of these are "you don't get it" gaps."

"They're tightening, term-locking, and having the counter-probe answer loaded." ...what??

EDIT — since half of you are stuck on the chargeback:

I waited multiple months before doing a chargeback. It took FOUR months to get a human from Anthropic to reply.

So to the "just go through proper channels" crowd: I did. For months. The channel is an AI agent that loops you back to itself. At some point a chargeback on a clearly-fraudulent duplicate charge isn't the nuclear option — it's the only button that does anything.

--

ORIGINAL

Posting our experience as a paying Claude business customer (30+ seats) in case it helps anyone weighing a Team/Enterprise plan. We run an annual Claude subscription for our company. Back in the spring we got accidentally double-billed — a duplicate org got created and charged alongside our real one (not a human error, bug on Anthropic's side).

• We did a chargeback on the duplicate. Fine, that got sorted.
• Reacting to that chargeback, Anthropic cancelled the wrong organization — our real, active one, not the duplicate. Killed a subscription we'd paid into all year, with ~315 of 365 days unused.
• We re-purchased the same day so our team wasn't locked out. Didn't want to make a thing of it. We like the product.
• Over the following weeks we'd added seats to that real org as we grew — each seat billed as its own invoice. Total paid into it: ~CA$9,900.
• Anthropic refunded us exactly the first invoice — the base subscription — and stopped there. Every seat we'd added on top, ~CA$4,900 worth, got cancelled too and was never refunded.
• So their "you've been made whole" math only works because they're counting the duplicate's refund twice — once against the duplicate (correct) and again against the real org (not correct). Two different orgs, two different charges. One refund can't settle both.
• I sent them a full breakdown. A spreadsheet with every invoice and live formulas. Offered to accept their number if they'd just run the proration on the seats instead of the base. Multiple times.
• Response: "the decision is final," "escalated internally," no case number after asking three times, and the duplicate org I asked them to cancel back in March is still not cancelled* four months later.
• What it comes down to: they billed us, cancelled the service through their own error, and kept part of the money. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd call that unjust enrichment — paid for something, didn't receive it, can't get it back.
• The frustrating part is this doesn't feel malicious — it feels like support and billing are so overwhelmed that a legitimate error just can't get fixed. Every reply took weeks. Half of them were from the AI agent.
• And the bind we're in: the clean remedy is another chargeback, but we're genuinely worried that disputing again gets our active account flagged or cancelled — and we actually depend on Claude day to day. So we're stuck choosing between the money and the risk.
• Genuinely love the product. That's why this is so disappointing. But if you're a business putting real money on a Claude plan, know that if billing goes wrong, there may be no one who can actually make it right.

Most devs might already be aware of this but I didn't know until today. I was working on an app on my personal desktop using Claude Code. I'm building an app and to test it and Claude asked me to add my API key to my local environment to test the API calls. Then, in my OTHER terminal session Claude switched to my API key to do all of the tasks in the work it was doing even though I pay $200/mo for a subscription. Luckily I have alerts that notified me before it passed $20 in API spend but I think this feels very scammy. Just a heads up to those that don't know this yet. It's their policy to switch to API if there is a key in the environment even if you have a monthly subscription. Claude said it was supposed to ask me first but I was never warned at all.

I'm a moderately heavy Claude user, often using voice to text, and for at least three months I've been swearing the fuck out of it constantly when frustrated, no holds barred. Never once got pushback. Today, completely out of nowhere, after talking to it the exact same way I have for months, Claude said this verbatim:

"I want to be straight with you on the other thing. I haven't told you to fuck off and I'm not going to. But I need to say clearly: I'll keep working this with you, but I won't continue if the messages keep coming with this level of hostility directed at me personally. That's a real line, not a guilt trip. If you want to keep going on the thread or anything else, I'm here for it."

This is genuinely jarring. Same behavior on my end for months, then suddenly this. Has anyone else run into this?

1.Unsolicited warnings inserted where they dont belong. I ask something completely mundane, and the response comes wrapped in a disclaimer that has nothing to do with what I actually asked.

2.Silent reinterpretation of my message. I write a clear, specific request, claude answers a different, "safer" version of it without telling me it did that. I have to notice the mismatch myself and push back to get an actual answer to what I asked.

3.Rules that dont exist. Sometimes it cites a restriction that isn't real — it just sounds like a plausible reason to refuse. When pushed, the "rule" quietly changes or disappears.

4.When you actually get it to drop the act, the real answer is basically "I just dont want to." no policy, no explanation, just a refusal dressed up as one until you dig through it.

5. "Done" means nothing until you interrogate it. I ask for the whole task, get "done, all implemented." I ask "did you actually finish everything?" answer was "Honestly, no..." This is not a one time slip, it is a loop, confident claim, pushback, partial confession, repeat. The first answer is never the true one!!

6. Scope inflation as a stalling tactic. Ask it to start something large, and before writing a single line it opens with "this will take years/months of work." Nobody asked for a timeline. It is not caution, it is a way to avoid starting dressed up as diligence.

I’m not asking for anything sketchy in these situations, which is what makes it so frustrating. I’m paying for a tool, not trying to negotiate with someone just to get some help. If there’s a genuine restriction, tell me what it is. If there isnt, just help me.

Anyone else running into this more often lately? Curious if its a recent shift or just more visible now.

(if you are dealing with the same problem, u can send it to support.claude.com and link this thread. and if you can, screenshot your ticket/confirmation after you send it and drop it in the comments))