Ask HN: Anthropic account suspended, anyone reinstated?
As a hobbyist embedded coder, I used a Claude Pro subscription to help with unfamiliar programming tasks. In late May 2025, out of the blue I received an account suspension notice.
The only recourse is to submit a Google Form, which I did. After weeks of waiting, I submitted another. Then over the ensuing weeks and months of silence from Anthropic, I’ve submitted several more of these forms, which enter a black hole, never to emerge. At one point I was able to message with a real, but ultimately unhelpful human. They have since closed that support channel; and now you can only dialogue with an AI chatbot.
Nothing I do is sketchy. At the time of the ban, I was traveling in the U.S. and may have been on a VPN. Possibly that triggered a security issue?
Has anyone successfully reinstated their access? How? Is there some way to talk to an actual human at Anthropic? It’s very dystopian. I used Anthropic for the better part of 6 months - many of those with 20x subscription. My account was suspended about 1.5 months ago without any stated reason (I suspect I tripped some kind of alarm because I authenticated on multiple of my own devices within a short period of time - but nothing I did was illegal or against the ToS to my knowledge) - since then I periodically tried sending them emails to support and their security team and I must have filled out the appeals form 5 times in total - I have never gotten a human response or reason. Its a little frustrating because they give no guidance on what that means - I still get marketing emails or emails about claude code changes - I switched over to OpenAI which at this point is also very decent at coding and their rate limits are much more generous. But to be honest the UX with Claude Code just felt somehow better. Same issue I faced, in fact I had 5 email ids at that time on my device and all of them got banned. Filling the Google form does not help in most of the cases for anthropic as the system itself has flagged something unusual, possibly multiple accounts from same device. Or temporary email login or multiple requests.
Issue is that they don't specify the cause, However recently on 3rd March 2026, out of sudden one of mine Gmail got banned however I haven't used it at all, lately on Claude.
I filled the form for appeal suspension at https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8241253-safeguards-wa... And after 2 days, it got reinstated. Only way I guess to recover it is to fill this form unfortunately. evil corporations. Along the same behavior as one way emails that are do-not-reply or similar. One of the few bright spots about lawyers is the larger your corporation, the more you are susceptible to a lawsuit where a far ranging motion for discovery get's approved by the judge, known as "Dumping Discovery" on you. Often times that alone will coerce the corporation to roll over and settle rather than have to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours of employee time piecing together all required by the discovery.