// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Anthropic banned me for "suspicious signals"
I opened my inbox and there it was: Claude, gone. Not a warning. Not a rate limit. A revocation.
Anthropic's Safeguards Team sent me the same template a lot of people seem to be getting lately. "An internal investigation of suspicious signals associated with your account indicates a violation of our Usage Policy." No clause named. No example. No "here's what we think you did." Just: access revoked, appeal by logging back into claude.ai, regards.
I've been a paying Anthropic customer for years. Right now I'm on Claude Max at $200/month. This isn't a free-tier "maybe they thought I was a bot" story. This is a paid, daily-driver account -- the thing I use to actually ship work -- taken offline by a sentence that could mean anything.
A colleague of mine -- completely independent setup, elsewhere in the Philippines -- got banned the moment they paid for Max at $100. Same product family. Same sudden wall. I'm on the higher Max tier and still got the template. I keep seeing the same shape next to billing events in other people's reports. I'm not saying Anthropic admitted the cause. I'm saying "we just took your money" clearly isn't a shield.
I'm not going to pretend Anthropic never has a real enforcement problem. They've publicly gone after third-party harnesses riding consumer OAuth -- OpenCode and friends showed up in that wave earlier this year. Fine. If you're abusing the consumer surface as a backdoor API, they will eventually notice.
See, that is not what "suspicious signals" communicates. Their own Help Center lists the boring categories -- repeated Usage Policy hits, unsupported location, ToS. It does not explain what a "suspicious signal" is. The email doesn't either. The appeal path dumps you into an in-product form after you log back in -- no human to plead your case to. You wait.
I'm not the only one staring at that exact wording. On the Claude Code issue tracker alone:
Sometimes people get reinstated fast -- one founder wrote about a travel-to-India false positive that flipped back in a couple of days. Good for them. That doesn't make the default experience okay. The default is: template, black box, form, wait.
The irony is not subtle. Anthropic spends a lot of brand equity on being the careful ones -- the lab that cares about misuse, the grown-ups in the room. Then the enforcement layer behaves like a 2010s Google account ban: automated, opaque, allergic to context -- and disproportionately painful if you are an individual who actually depends on the product.
If you are a company burning five figures a month through the API, you have account managers, invoices, and leverage. If you are a person on Max -- even $200 Max, even after years of paying them -- you have a no-reply address and a reference ID. When that account dies, your productivity dies with it. There is no spare multi-thousand-dollar token budget sitting around to absorb the downtime while Safeguards thinks about your appeal form.