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

A frustrated user showed up on Hacker News with a very modern problem: he says Anthropic’s coding helper, Claude Code, banned him twice, refunded his money, and then hit him with what sounds like the internet’s coldest breakup text — a generic note saying the account would not be restored. His alleged crime? Leaving a virtual private network, or VPN, on during signup the first time, then trying again later with the same credit card. He says he was only doing painfully normal stuff like summarizing notes and asking for help cleaning up code. In other words: not exactly supervillain behavior.

But the real fireworks were in the comments, where the crowd turned this into a full-on customer service horror story. One person casually dropped the bomb that they’d been banned too and simply made a new account, which triggered an immediate jealous reply: “Lucky you.” Another commenter claimed the company’s automated fraud system is probably overreacting and that false alarms happen often enough to be a pattern — but not important enough for the company to care. Ouch. And then came the sharpest joke of the thread: maybe Anthropic is using its own AI to detect violations. “Go figure,” one user snarked, serving up the kind of darkly funny irony the internet lives for.

Not everyone was ready to rage, though. One practical voice basically said: forget loyalty, date the rival. If Claude won’t text back, try OpenAI instead. And just like that, the comments stopped being about one ban and became a bigger drama about faceless automated decisions, impossible appeals, and whether users are now expected to beg robots for mercy.