Same experience. We had a billing bug which put our organization into a loop. Couldn't cancel the subscription, couldn't add one, couldn't delete the users of the organization because of the lack of subscription, and so on. It was easier in the end to rename the organization to 'do not use' and create another one than wait a month for their non existent support.
I had the displeasure of interacting with that support agent earlier today and was very surprised. It's just as good as the one my ISP has.
We're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer support decisions. But shhhh, it's voluntarily nerfed just slightly bellow ASI for our safety.
> We're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer support decisions.
Anthropic seems to have adopted the toxic Google mentality of "good enough product, barely any customer support" despite being one of the entities that can crack this.
Yeah this would make a lot of sense to crack, given that customer support must be a huge potential revenue stream for them. Starting by fixing their own support would make sense, given that it’s a relatively limited in scope.
Absolutely, the world changing near AGI capable of PHD reasoning and imagination just cannot possibly be trusted to decide on a refund. They'll let it choose a target for a Tomahawk missile but the real problem would be giving it the decision to refund a few bucks. The broligarchy care less about collateral damage in war than they do about refunding someone's $20/mo sub.
OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Google, MSFT, Spotify, Duolingo and NVidia - those are the ones that come immediately to mind. They're either selling the AI (or the tools to make the AI) or hoping against all hope that they're on the right side of bubble history.
If we soften the claim to "increase engineer productivity" I think something like 70% of engineers would also agree. If you tack on "if applied wisely" then you'll probably be up to 95% of engineers
> Anthropic is an AI company that builds one of the most capable AI assistants in the world. Their support system is a Fin AI chatbot that can’t actually help you.
This really cuts to the reality of AI hype: no, agents are not nearly as capable as OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. need you (or rather your C-suite, itching to fire you) to believe. They really, really need you to believe the hype. How can you tell? Cases like this and the fact that there are 5000 open bugs, constant regressions, ignored feature requests in the CC repo. The fact that Codex doesn't fully implement the simple and well-defined MCP spec for prompts. The fact that even CC has gaps with the MCP implementation...a spec that they created!
If the progenitors with functionally infinite tokens can't get this basic stuff right, everything else they are doing is just blowing smoke. I don't care if you can ship a kernel compiler or a janky "browser"; how about just make your software work? The smartest guys in this space, engineers making 7 figures in TC, with billions in capital, unlimited tokens, and access to the best models cannot make a simple customer support chatbot work.
But you! You're expected to deliver that customer support agent that's going to allow them to cut 500 people from payroll. You'll have it by Monday, right?
What if they built their company with poor support, so they don’t have to hold up to any standard ? But others companies have historically good reputation for good customer support, and maybe AI can help them automate easily 80% of easiest requests
Hear me out: what if a lot of the hype they are selling you is performative marketing that they absolutely need your C-suite to believe so they can cut more headcount? Then spend a bunch of time generating piles of code that is human unmaintainable because now you're using AI code reviewers, AI testers, AI QA. Then thrash around using more tokens when it invariably causes production issues and no one can read the code anymore except for their latest and greatest models with 1m context window.
Those are already automated by making your first question "Did you plug it in?", followed by "Did you actually plug it in?". Or industry equivalent. It's not like there wasn't any research into this in the past century.
Clearly they have sales and other teams as the important people within the company, with customer services being down the pecking order.
They don't need AI to automate their customer service requests, they just need decent forms with a standard issue helpdesk system. It takes some work to get right, but anyone with experience of building customer support services will be able to do that, to put most of the customer service team out of work!!!
The problem is that the Law of The Instrument applies:
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
So we have some AI 'hammer' going on here, and it is the wrong tool.
At a guess, 80% of the customer service requests are going to be billing related, with some need to provide refunds or free credits. Get the form right so it shows the right boxes and these 'easy wins' can show up as a big list that a customer service person has to glance over before hitting the 'refund everyone' button. You need the human there to take responsibility, plus they can work on the 20% of other tickets, once they have spent ten minutes clearing down the refunds/extra credits requests.
Google don't sell much to end customers, therefore no support. If I search Google for how to remove fonts from my computer that are not latin, and their AI bot gives me an answer that zaps my whole computer, I can't complain and ask for a refund because I never paid anything in the first place. Google do not need to speak to a single customer.
Meanwhile, Arsthropic have a commercial product with billing. They prefer not to do customer service, but they are stupid. Every contact with customers and friendly customer service is an opportunity to sell more to customers or to not have them hate you. This is why companies should do customer service, however, they also need to put CS at the heart of the org chart and acknowledge that a well run CS department raises revenue and is not a cost.
It's really a bit fascinating. I've had Claude one-shot complex functionality... and I've had it be unable to debug its own .mcp.json file effectively.
Agents are very capable. Their implementation matters. I doubt many support agents have access to editing user records, so even if they can accept responsibility they won't be able to make any radical changes to your account to fix those.
It's not AI problem per se, it's a product problem.
I've also been waiting over three weeks to speak with customer support after being gifted an annual subscription just as my payment card expired. The failed payment (after the $200 gift) downgraded my account to the free tier and I lost my annual subscription. I had to pay another $20 to get back into the pro tier plan, but now for some reason I only have $197 in credits and I'm on the monthly subscription instead of the annual. Anthropic basically just made 3+ months of credits disappear for their own billing mistake.
The kicker? When you get downgraded to the Free tier, they don't offer any support beyond the AI bot. You have to go through some hoops to get it to open a support ticket to maybe talk to a human in 4-5 weeks. Unbelievable.
TBF, I think Anthropic is a victim of their own success right now. We've had clients reach out to their sales team and be unable to reach anyone. I think they are just busier than they can actually handle.
I had a very mediocre experience with their sales team when I was trying to understand how my company could sign up for their enterprise plan. I could barely get the time of day from them and once I finally got a response, the rep knew very little and never responded to my follow up questions. At that time, enterprise plans started at a $250,000 minimum spend/year, which we would've been well over.
Yes, it’s pretty much the case, they are trying to scale as fast as they can from what I understand. Their growth over the last year has been just insane
In all seriousness, shouldn't Anthropic be heavily dogfooding this sort of use case? I'm also not a huge fan of Amazon's support system, but they at least seem to be using their AI tools a lot for support responses (which has its own issues, but credit where its due).
Every conference talk on this stuff seems to suggest that we're all way behind the curve on AI implementation, but I suspect its mostly smoke and mirrors and mechanical turks. My company invests heavily in automated IVR and chat responses and we still optimize for getting the customer to a real agent. Those agents are largely overseas BPOs, but at least that's better than an AI loop that gets you nowhere.
I weirdly feel like this is a newer issue. Hadn't had a problem running queries/actions previously up until this past month where it seems I'm constantly get hit with rate limits while not increasing my usage
The default model is Opus 1M context, so autocompact doesn't run as frequently, and that just Devours your session budget if you're not careful. There are some env variables you can (ask claude to) set to lower your max context window and autocompact threshold.
It's important to remember that a chargeback should be considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should be comfortable with the possibility that one might never do business with this company again, since it could result in being blacklisted (even if one is, in fact, in the right). I'm not saying not to do it, but one should keep in mind the potential repercussions.
If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them money. I do this all the time and have never been blacklisted.
Some companies like Activision clearly state in their terms that chargeback means you will be permanently banned, no exceptions. You'll lose your account and access to all digital "purchases" forever.
They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business with you.
I have a few customers like that. They sign up, forget about it, then they see it on their statement and issue a chargeback. Not only do they get their $20 back (that they very willingly signed up for), but I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
> I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
I've seen some businesses send a pre-billing email telling customers that they'll be charged on a certain date, so that customers have time to cancel if they want.
Cloudflare does that for domain renewals, sending out emails 30 and 60 days before.
Of course, there are also some businesses that hope that customers forget that they're subscribed, so that there's breakage.
Mine is a one-off payment :( They just forget they paid for it, plus the company name isn't the same as the app name, so they just go "welp, someone must be stealing from me!" and request a chargeback.
Completely by accident, I have a setup that sends a pdf invoice to customers a couple of days after the sale. I’m pretty sure it’s a stripe option I must’ve misclicked.
Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone’s had an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to write to me and tell me about it. They let off their steam in the email and then we make things good together. (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email addresses)
I still don’t know what or where the setting is, mind.
That's a great idea, thanks! I've found and enabled a few emails, though I think the actual invoice email is a checkout parameter. This should help, thanks!
Anecdotally I helped a client entirely eliminate their chargeback rate by creating a new subsidiary named directly after their product, so that the billing line item was obviously the product. They also saw a slight increase in inbound sales, which surprised me.
Were you dealing with some other payment processor or bank that didn't allow custom statement descriptors? Stripe and PayPal let me write whatever I want there.
That's a great idea, but it's only helpful above a certain sales volume, which I don't really have. It's just disappointing when the charge back happens, but the economics of the business don't really warrant doing anything about it.
You joke but I got bbb involved with a scammy business insurance company that is easy to sign up for but you can't cancel or stop renewal or change billing info. Company has an infinite hold line and never responds to anything. Filed a complaint on BBB and it was responded to next business day.
Believe it or not, back in the mists of time we had these things called “public institutions” which were at least notionally chartered to, and in fact somewhat did, act in the public benefit.
The BBB was one of those — not always perfect, but consumer-friendly and not out to scam or profit. Yelp is just another VC-backed money play. They do not now or have they ever claimed or intended to make the world a better place without regard for their own profit.
I don't think it's helpful to think about this as the company "trying to steal from you". There is no intention here. It's just something that got lost in a bad IT system. You gain nothing from issuing a chargeback. You imperceptibly nudge some statistic and a "banned for life" flag might automatically get flipped in a database. There's no righteous comeuppance here.
You try to contact support, pester them a bit, call someone if possible, and eventually, you may get your money back. If you don't, then you issue the chargeback.
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.
there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.
ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole customer service the better, because it is difficult for companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer service in the first place.
I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number?
If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.
It's up to the company, but since many companies don't want to keep card numbers around (and some processors don't let you see the card number anyway), they're probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the IP address of the transaction for "additional screening" on all future transactions, etc.
IPs are notoriously unreliable for identity pinning, particularly in this age of CGNAT.
If they can’t or don’t want cc numbers (makes sense considering how painful PCI guidelines are anyway) does that mean they need to rely on more tools from the processors or user accounts maintained by the merchant themselves?
CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.
The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the Luhn check digit is 9 digits — that's 1 billion numbers that issuers can give out before a collision happens.
Except the banks have "helpfully" provided a service to merchants to tell them, "this card has expired, here is the new number to charge" (or expiry/CVV).
I remember getting into an argument with a bank teller about me wanting to block/dispute transactions and how they kept approving transactions. "But you have an agreement with the gym..." That's between me and the gym, not for you to facilitate on their behalf.
It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them directly.
All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank will then investigate (however they do that), and eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may include a chargeback).
It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail. Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own rates are affected (or worse).
Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either -- they just want to be made financially whole, however that happens.
---
I had a problem once with a local record store where I got charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off. But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem or hand it over to someone who could.
So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and they would investigate. So that's what I did.
The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the problem by refunding both of the charges, asked if that made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked me for my business.
That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my fondness for the business was completely restored.
---
Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the vendor did was fix the problem.
The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.
I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands of dollars there over the course of decades, and they knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it was time to take down some release date posters and put up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still kept giving them money until they eventually closed their doors forever because the owner was old and the building got ruined in a flood.
You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on their own. That's all I need to know about the place. Those fuckin' scumbags!
Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to me.
More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.
A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.)
Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
In 2018 I made a reservation with Tesla for a Powerwall by "paying" 500 EUR. After being ignored for months (someone was supposed to contact us regarding the installation), we started asking for the money back. Didn't hear anything. Started sending an email once a year, in 2025 they finally replied asking for bank account details to send back the money.
I think this may be a purposeful tactic. It’s like raising investor money from people who get no shares for their money. These reservations are just scammy.
I had a similar experience. Pretty ironic that we can't reach a human given that "Anthropic" literally means "involving or concerning the existence of human life".
It’s funny because not even claude knows how to reach someone. It was freaking out over why it couldn’t follow my instructions and kept pulling away from them. They exhausted everything and finally they were like I can’t do anything about this.. Although they did admit if I said I was suicidal a message would probably get to a human but that they couldn’t do that as it would be wrong lol
Anthropic doesn't allow you to hide or unshare Projects which were shared by team members who are no longer on the team. Contacted them about this two months ago, have yet to hear from any human.
Sorry to hear that. Yeah, it seems like this is a shared experience among many Claude users. Hoping that this post will draw more attention to the issue so that Anthropic will address it.
Yeah, it's funny because they claim that we are reaching out to "Enterprise" support - but it's the exact same support experience as yours, a Fin AI Chatbot that replies with "Thank you for reaching out to Anthropic's Enterprise Support. We've received your request and a member of our team will be in touch soon for further assistance."
it took me like 6 weeks and 12 chat sessions to get Anthropic to essentially end the conversation with "Yeah, whoops, we'll forward that to the dev team." when they cut my max sub short by 4 hours.
that's the single reason I am no longer a customer. I don't feel like shoveling money at non-communicating phantoms.
4 hours of credit wasn't by any means worth the time, what irked me was the casual disregard for lost customer value.
Well, that's kinda the problem, isn't it? Even after being erroneously charged and ghosted by their non-existent support for a month, you'll still happily keep paying for their services.
If most people think like you, why indeed bother providing support at all?
Good point. I did actually cancel my Claude subscription a week or two ago, but I renewed it (regretfully) just the other day. The only other SOTA model that seems to be on-par with Opus 4.6 for engineering work is (maybe?) Codex 5.3, though I would rather not support Sam Altman indirectly.
I did a chargeback against OpenAI for something similar and I showed my credit card company the logs with the support bot, as it was my only point of contact for the company.
Have you tried suieng then in small claims court? They skimp in being a real company with real legal support by burning infestor capital, because staff attorney salaries are accounted for much harder than individualized lawsuits from practices not directly resolved next lay period.
Most people who commit wire fraud weren't socially bullied and criticized enough before their professional positions to keep in line legally. Useless failures.
I wouldn't hold your breath. It seems like the only way to get an actual human response is by complaining on Twitter/X and hoping that Boris Cherny responds. https://x.com/bcherny
> I even wrote it not only per email but also in the "in-chat feedback" system
Yeah, I did the same. Before falling back to sending an email to support@mail.anthropic.com (which my blog post references), I had 3 separate Fin AI in-chat convos trying to get in touch with someone. All of them defaulted to the "ask for a refund" workflow that only applies for subscriptions and left me more frustrated than anything.
This is the risk of being a consumer in the AI world - companies are running extremely lean on real humans and are deferring support to AI chatbots with no real reasoning abilities...
Also an issue with scale - for example, Google having similar issues of not handling small, isolated cases.
See the other commenter/thread that recommended I do this. I'm worried that by doing a chargeback, I will be blacklisted from using Anthropic's services, which I feel like is a reasonable assumption.
If the product is really so good that you're willing to let the vendor abuse and defraud you then just treat it as a cost of doing business and move on. Personally I wouldn't tolerate that, but I guess it's a matter of priorities.
Until they do start doing identity verification, I think you're good. Frankly, don't be a coward. If you're getting treated like this, why would you even want to use their services in the future?
That will get their attention - to blacklist you from ever doing business again with them. People saying this is a nuclear option are telling this because they know what a charge back means for a business owner. So treat it like that.
Same, I tested Claude Code CLI and it crapped out and took my money, and they haven't responded to my billing dispute yet. Meanwhile JetBrains replies within hours and Junie is LLM agnostic. I'm a huge fan of JetBrains for AI coding.
The Gumroad CEO infamously fired and rehired everyone as contractors, and worked for DOGE last year until his delusions were shattered. It seems that your experience doesn't come from nowhere.
Ah, I wouldn't have written this blog post if I had known that that was the usual turnaround time. There should really be more transparency on when one should expect to hear back rather than the generic response of "a member of our team will be with you as soon as we can."
edit: albeit another commenter claims they have been waiting for 2 months...
Thinking it might be time to push for some laws to mandate companies have better systems to handle and address concerns that impact customers businesses and livelihoods.
This inability to reach and/or get things resolved through customer support channels seems endemic, and probably generally part of the enshittification trend as a whole.
The fact nothing has changed regarding their non-existent support within a year just shows where their priorities lie. And I will make the bold assumption that this situation will be unchanged after exactly one year.
I'm not surprised, I burn (on purpose) more than 15k$/month on Anthropic tokens and I've never been able to talk to any of their sales despite filling the contact form every week for the past 4 months :')
Large corporations have been downsizing on QA and CS roles since before the LLM era. For many of those companies the lack of proper QA leads to more problems for users which compounds the lack of available CS staff. It's called either enshittification or maximizing shareholder value, can't remember which.
I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad then that I have a ticket open that I keep updating every few days with how long it’s been without a response. It’s only been a few weeks.
We've been trying to get a Claude Code subscription for my company, the pricing page says $25 but they actually charge £25, 34% higher. I've been trying to talk to them for months, their support people don't even read what I'm saying and insist that it's somehow because of proration.
I'm fairly sure their billing backend is vibe-coded and their support is worse than Google's.
This sucks but is not surprising at all. Anthropic has more demand than it could ever fulfill, and looking into support tickets asking for refunds is never going to get anyone’s attention. If you actually want the money back, assuming you live in the US, this is what small-claims court is for.
Once again [0], Anthropic does not care about you and they are not your friends.
The other day Dario and Co, were looking at a robotic lamp that does your laundry and folds your clothes. He cares more about investing in that than your billing issue.
To them, they see us as gambling addicts, whilst we pay them their overpriced credits at their casino.
Same experience. We had a billing bug which put our organization into a loop. Couldn't cancel the subscription, couldn't add one, couldn't delete the users of the organization because of the lack of subscription, and so on. It was easier in the end to rename the organization to 'do not use' and create another one than wait a month for their non existent support.
I had the displeasure of interacting with that support agent earlier today and was very surprised. It's just as good as the one my ISP has.
We're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer support decisions. But shhhh, it's voluntarily nerfed just slightly bellow ASI for our safety.
> We're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer support decisions.
Anthropic seems to have adopted the toxic Google mentality of "good enough product, barely any customer support" despite being one of the entities that can crack this.
Yeah this would make a lot of sense to crack, given that customer support must be a huge potential revenue stream for them. Starting by fixing their own support would make sense, given that it’s a relatively limited in scope.
You're not meant to trust. Stop getting hooked on company PIR
They didn't ssy they did trust their claims.
Absolutely, the world changing near AGI capable of PHD reasoning and imagination just cannot possibly be trusted to decide on a refund. They'll let it choose a target for a Tomahawk missile but the real problem would be giving it the decision to refund a few bucks. The broligarchy care less about collateral damage in war than they do about refunding someone's $20/mo sub.
hmm, if i give customer refund i can make less paperclips
if i target tomahawk missiles the government will give me money and i can make more paperclips
effective paperclipism strikes again
Who keeps claiming these models are meant to replace engineers?
OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Google, MSFT, Spotify, Duolingo and NVidia - those are the ones that come immediately to mind. They're either selling the AI (or the tools to make the AI) or hoping against all hope that they're on the right side of bubble history.
If we soften the claim to "increase engineer productivity" I think something like 70% of engineers would also agree. If you tack on "if applied wisely" then you'll probably be up to 95% of engineers
the remaining population of linkedin users?
Has anyone tried to turn one of thse support agents into a coding harness?
Not like super seriously, but in limited joke capacities it does work
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1rsbxn9/stop_sp...
If the progenitors with functionally infinite tokens can't get this basic stuff right, everything else they are doing is just blowing smoke. I don't care if you can ship a kernel compiler or a janky "browser"; how about just make your software work? The smartest guys in this space, engineers making 7 figures in TC, with billions in capital, unlimited tokens, and access to the best models cannot make a simple customer support chatbot work.
But you! You're expected to deliver that customer support agent that's going to allow them to cut 500 people from payroll. You'll have it by Monday, right?
It's some Tai Lopez "Here in my garage" energy.
Let that sink in.
What if they built their company with poor support, so they don’t have to hold up to any standard ? But others companies have historically good reputation for good customer support, and maybe AI can help them automate easily 80% of easiest requests
Hear me out: what if a lot of the hype they are selling you is performative marketing that they absolutely need your C-suite to believe so they can cut more headcount? Then spend a bunch of time generating piles of code that is human unmaintainable because now you're using AI code reviewers, AI testers, AI QA. Then thrash around using more tokens when it invariably causes production issues and no one can read the code anymore except for their latest and greatest models with 1m context window.
Congrats. Thats the strategy of OAi and Anthropic.
Those are already automated by making your first question "Did you plug it in?", followed by "Did you actually plug it in?". Or industry equivalent. It's not like there wasn't any research into this in the past century.
Clearly they have sales and other teams as the important people within the company, with customer services being down the pecking order.
They don't need AI to automate their customer service requests, they just need decent forms with a standard issue helpdesk system. It takes some work to get right, but anyone with experience of building customer support services will be able to do that, to put most of the customer service team out of work!!!
The problem is that the Law of The Instrument applies:
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
So we have some AI 'hammer' going on here, and it is the wrong tool.
At a guess, 80% of the customer service requests are going to be billing related, with some need to provide refunds or free credits. Get the form right so it shows the right boxes and these 'easy wins' can show up as a big list that a customer service person has to glance over before hitting the 'refund everyone' button. You need the human there to take responsibility, plus they can work on the 20% of other tickets, once they have spent ten minutes clearing down the refunds/extra credits requests.
Google don't sell much to end customers, therefore no support. If I search Google for how to remove fonts from my computer that are not latin, and their AI bot gives me an answer that zaps my whole computer, I can't complain and ask for a refund because I never paid anything in the first place. Google do not need to speak to a single customer.
Meanwhile, Arsthropic have a commercial product with billing. They prefer not to do customer service, but they are stupid. Every contact with customers and friendly customer service is an opportunity to sell more to customers or to not have them hate you. This is why companies should do customer service, however, they also need to put CS at the heart of the org chart and acknowledge that a well run CS department raises revenue and is not a cost.
It's really a bit fascinating. I've had Claude one-shot complex functionality... and I've had it be unable to debug its own .mcp.json file effectively.
Agents are very capable. Their implementation matters. I doubt many support agents have access to editing user records, so even if they can accept responsibility they won't be able to make any radical changes to your account to fix those. It's not AI problem per se, it's a product problem.
So it's just a coincidence that they can't edit user records? They can't get another agent to fix that, even?
I've also been waiting over three weeks to speak with customer support after being gifted an annual subscription just as my payment card expired. The failed payment (after the $200 gift) downgraded my account to the free tier and I lost my annual subscription. I had to pay another $20 to get back into the pro tier plan, but now for some reason I only have $197 in credits and I'm on the monthly subscription instead of the annual. Anthropic basically just made 3+ months of credits disappear for their own billing mistake.
The kicker? When you get downgraded to the Free tier, they don't offer any support beyond the AI bot. You have to go through some hoops to get it to open a support ticket to maybe talk to a human in 4-5 weeks. Unbelievable.
Oh no, that's the same on the $200 tier, don't worry. You never talk to a human.
TBF, I think Anthropic is a victim of their own success right now. We've had clients reach out to their sales team and be unable to reach anyone. I think they are just busier than they can actually handle.
I had a very mediocre experience with their sales team when I was trying to understand how my company could sign up for their enterprise plan. I could barely get the time of day from them and once I finally got a response, the rep knew very little and never responded to my follow up questions. At that time, enterprise plans started at a $250,000 minimum spend/year, which we would've been well over.
Yes, it’s pretty much the case, they are trying to scale as fast as they can from what I understand. Their growth over the last year has been just insane
A bit ironic for an AI company. But your business should put trust into their tech.
In all seriousness, shouldn't Anthropic be heavily dogfooding this sort of use case? I'm also not a huge fan of Amazon's support system, but they at least seem to be using their AI tools a lot for support responses (which has its own issues, but credit where its due).
Every conference talk on this stuff seems to suggest that we're all way behind the curve on AI implementation, but I suspect its mostly smoke and mirrors and mechanical turks. My company invests heavily in automated IVR and chat responses and we still optimize for getting the customer to a real agent. Those agents are largely overseas BPOs, but at least that's better than an AI loop that gets you nowhere.
I had a similar thing happen where I was looking to recover funds from unexpected extra usage charges and got went through an identical experience.
I realize the company barely has time to cash checks, but failing to handle small fry reasonable charge disputes should be handled appropriately.
> AI-only support that serves as a wall between customers and anyone who can actually resolve their issue
My god. Anthropic has done it. Those crazy bastards have gone ahead and done it!
They've achieved AGI for customer service. It's just like the real thing!
I tried their Pro plan on March 1 and immediately noticed how bad their usage limits were, so I asked for a refund that same evening.
Their chatbot accepted the request, I was downgraded to the free plan immediately, and since then I have been waiting for the money.
Did you follow up? You might need to do it again before charge back.
Thankfully that's not Google, so your life is not going to be turned upside down because they don't give a f*.
I opened a new ticket over three weeks ago to ask about the status of the refund, and that has been left untouched as well.
Now I have submitted a reclamation request to my bank and am waiting for a response.
I weirdly feel like this is a newer issue. Hadn't had a problem running queries/actions previously up until this past month where it seems I'm constantly get hit with rate limits while not increasing my usage
The default model is Opus 1M context, so autocompact doesn't run as frequently, and that just Devours your session budget if you're not careful. There are some env variables you can (ask claude to) set to lower your max context window and autocompact threshold.
Issue a chargeback.
It's important to remember that a chargeback should be considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should be comfortable with the possibility that one might never do business with this company again, since it could result in being blacklisted (even if one is, in fact, in the right). I'm not saying not to do it, but one should keep in mind the potential repercussions.
If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them money. I do this all the time and have never been blacklisted.
Some companies like Activision clearly state in their terms that chargeback means you will be permanently banned, no exceptions. You'll lose your account and access to all digital "purchases" forever.
They don't need to prove anything to stop doing business with you.
With some of the large companies, blacklisted is a real concern.
eBay is one known example.
I've heard the same for Amazon (forget if it was retail or AWS).
It's cheaper to lose your business than to have a proper human review every complaint.
I've charged back amazon over retail issues that they did not deem worthy of providing me a human to interact with.
It whined about it for a bit on their site but eventually just gave up. Works normal again.
I have a few customers like that. They sign up, forget about it, then they see it on their statement and issue a chargeback. Not only do they get their $20 back (that they very willingly signed up for), but I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
> I have to pay another $35 to Stripe for the privilege of having a forgetful customer who couldn't even be bothered to email me for a refund.
I've seen some businesses send a pre-billing email telling customers that they'll be charged on a certain date, so that customers have time to cancel if they want.
Cloudflare does that for domain renewals, sending out emails 30 and 60 days before.
Of course, there are also some businesses that hope that customers forget that they're subscribed, so that there's breakage.
> Cloudflare does that for domain renewals
That's just standard. Every domain registrar/vendor does this.
Mine is a one-off payment :( They just forget they paid for it, plus the company name isn't the same as the app name, so they just go "welp, someone must be stealing from me!" and request a chargeback.
Completely by accident, I have a setup that sends a pdf invoice to customers a couple of days after the sale. I’m pretty sure it’s a stripe option I must’ve misclicked.
Anyway- turns out that on the rare occasion someone’s had an issue, this gives them a really easy mechanism to write to me and tell me about it. They let off their steam in the email and then we make things good together. (Yet another reason why I always oppose noreply email addresses)
I still don’t know what or where the setting is, mind.
That's a great idea, thanks! I've found and enabled a few emails, though I think the actual invoice email is a checkout parameter. This should help, thanks!
Anecdotally I helped a client entirely eliminate their chargeback rate by creating a new subsidiary named directly after their product, so that the billing line item was obviously the product. They also saw a slight increase in inbound sales, which surprised me.
Were you dealing with some other payment processor or bank that didn't allow custom statement descriptors? Stripe and PayPal let me write whatever I want there.
That's a great idea, but it's only helpful above a certain sales volume, which I don't really have. It's just disappointing when the charge back happens, but the economics of the business don't really warrant doing anything about it.
Yeah that kind of seems like antiquated fear-mongering. Next they should call the BBB and leave a strongly-worded review!
You joke but I got bbb involved with a scammy business insurance company that is easy to sign up for but you can't cancel or stop renewal or change billing info. Company has an infinite hold line and never responds to anything. Filed a complaint on BBB and it was responded to next business day.
wait, int the BBB just boomer yelp?
Believe it or not, back in the mists of time we had these things called “public institutions” which were at least notionally chartered to, and in fact somewhat did, act in the public benefit.
The BBB was one of those — not always perfect, but consumer-friendly and not out to scam or profit. Yelp is just another VC-backed money play. They do not now or have they ever claimed or intended to make the world a better place without regard for their own profit.
I don't think it's helpful to think about this as the company "trying to steal from you". There is no intention here. It's just something that got lost in a bad IT system. You gain nothing from issuing a chargeback. You imperceptibly nudge some statistic and a "banned for life" flag might automatically get flipped in a database. There's no righteous comeuppance here.
You try to contact support, pester them a bit, call someone if possible, and eventually, you may get your money back. If you don't, then you issue the chargeback.
> There is no intention here.
You don’t think it’s funny how the mechanism for taking the money is never broken?
Work with a large company who won’t pay your 30 or 45 day invoice for 90 days before you broadly decide this.
This is, yes you were robbed, but what if you want to partner with the bandit later?
They'll just rob you in your future interactions too.
But what if the robber becomes a monopoly and you have to partner with them in the future? Who's gonna save you? Government?
Then you get to enjoy mandatory robbery.
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.
there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.
ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.
a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
Unless you're big cheese, too many disputes can get a company cut off. Disputes aren't free to mediate, there's a cost to handle each one.
Visa/MC can block a company, happens for lots of reasons.
The more people use chargebacks to get around black hole customer service the better, because it is difficult for companies to blacklist everyone. If they don't want to pay the mediation fee, they should provide customer service in the first place.
I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number?
If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.
It's up to the company, but since many companies don't want to keep card numbers around (and some processors don't let you see the card number anyway), they're probably more likely to block on identity. Maybe flag the IP address of the transaction for "additional screening" on all future transactions, etc.
IPs are notoriously unreliable for identity pinning, particularly in this age of CGNAT.
If they can’t or don’t want cc numbers (makes sense considering how painful PCI guidelines are anyway) does that mean they need to rely on more tools from the processors or user accounts maintained by the merchant themselves?
CC numbers are also bound to get recycled eventually as cards expire and/or get replaced... even if you block a card, it might have a new owner 6 months or so later.
The number space between the first 6 digits (BIN) and the Luhn check digit is 9 digits — that's 1 billion numbers that issuers can give out before a collision happens.
Except the banks have "helpfully" provided a service to merchants to tell them, "this card has expired, here is the new number to charge" (or expiry/CVV).
I remember getting into an argument with a bank teller about me wanting to block/dispute transactions and how they kept approving transactions. "But you have an agreement with the gym..." That's between me and the gym, not for you to facilitate on their behalf.
It's also important to remember that chargebacks aren't under our control. As cardholders, we can't issue them directly.
All we can do is submit a dispute to the bank. The bank will then investigate (however they do that), and eventually act (in whatever way they choose -- which may include a chargeback).
It may seem pedantic, but it's an important detail. Chargebacks are ugly. They constitute red flags on merchant accounts, and with enough of those red flags their own rates are affected (or worse).
Nobody wants chargebacks. Banks don't want them (they take time, and therefore money, to deal with). Vendors certainly don't want them. And consumers don't want them, either -- they just want to be made financially whole, however that happens.
---
I had a problem once with a local record store where I got charged twice for one purchase. I loved that store very much (I grew up buying my music there), and at no point did I think that they would ever deliberately rip anyone off. But somehow after repeated phone calls and at least one visit, nobody I talked was able to either fix the problem or hand it over to someone who could.
So, in desperation: I called the bank and asked for help. I told them what had happened, and what I'd tried to do to resolve it, and they told me I could file a dispute and they would investigate. So that's what I did.
The next afternoon, I got a phone call from the store's very apologetic bookkeeper. He informed me that he'd received a call from my bank, and that he'd fixed the problem by refunding both of the charges, asked if that made me satisfied, apologized profusely again, and thanked me for my business.
That was a little bit above-and-beyond on the humbleness scale, but whatever. My problem was more than fixed and my fondness for the business was completely restored.
---
Anyway, back to the point about being pedantic with nomenclature: All I did was file a dispute, all the bank did was make a phone call to the right person, and all the vendor did was fix the problem.
No chargeback took place.
The fact that the record store could have easily handled your issue, but chose not to (and chose to not empower any of their employees to) until a bank got involved, should give a clue about what kind of company they actually were.
Yeah, good point.
I'll just forget about the fact that I'd spent thousands of dollars there over the course of decades, and they knew what I liked and would order inventory hoping that I'd buy it, and hold onto some of the tchotchke when it was time to take down some release date posters and put up new, just in case I wanted to take some, and I still kept giving them money until they eventually closed their doors forever because the owner was old and the building got ruined in a flood.
You're right. None of that was important. I'll just focus on that one incident when the kid at the counter of a record store couldn't figure out a financial problem on their own. That's all I need to know about the place. Those fuckin' scumbags!
Thank you very much. Your insight is very rewarding to me.
So the Anthropic company would blacklist you for taking your money back by force that they owe you?
Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as anything else.
More like, you don't sue a vendor and then expect the relationship to go back to status quo ante.
A chargeback is essentially binding arbitration and it can be existentially costly for small businesses, especially those unable effectively to advocate for themselves in a fairly complex and little-known process. Excess chargeback initiations - even of failed chargebacks - will also get acquirer accounts closed, meaning the business formerly a client of that acquirer can now no longer accept credit cards. (Modern acquirers like Stripe also do this, because the card issuers and payment networks will eventually cut them off if they don't: Stripe is not "too big to fail" according to Visa, which is why you may not sell sex or porn via Stripe.)
Anthropic doesn't need to care, of course. No one is going to fire them as a customer over excess chargebacks, and a hundred such fees are still cheaper than one hire. Anthropic has a burn rate. Chargebacks impinge much more heavily on businesses that need to earn money selling goods or services. It's important not to confuse one with the other.
Yikes. That's unacceptable. Crazy that it has been over a month and you still haven't gotten the refund.
In 2018 I made a reservation with Tesla for a Powerwall by "paying" 500 EUR. After being ignored for months (someone was supposed to contact us regarding the installation), we started asking for the money back. Didn't hear anything. Started sending an email once a year, in 2025 they finally replied asking for bank account details to send back the money.
Cool.
Ask them for the interest too. I would imagine the 2018 to 2025 inflation entitles you to at least another 200 EUR on top of the original sum.
I don't think the original terms of contract volunteered you to act as a lending institution.
I think this may be a purposeful tactic. It’s like raising investor money from people who get no shares for their money. These reservations are just scammy.
I had a similar experience. Pretty ironic that we can't reach a human given that "Anthropic" literally means "involving or concerning the existence of human life".
It’s funny because not even claude knows how to reach someone. It was freaking out over why it couldn’t follow my instructions and kept pulling away from them. They exhausted everything and finally they were like I can’t do anything about this.. Although they did admit if I said I was suicidal a message would probably get to a human but that they couldn’t do that as it would be wrong lol
Anthropic doesn't allow you to hide or unshare Projects which were shared by team members who are no longer on the team. Contacted them about this two months ago, have yet to hear from any human.
Sorry to hear that. Yeah, it seems like this is a shared experience among many Claude users. Hoping that this post will draw more attention to the issue so that Anthropic will address it.
Yeah, it's funny because they claim that we are reaching out to "Enterprise" support - but it's the exact same support experience as yours, a Fin AI Chatbot that replies with "Thank you for reaching out to Anthropic's Enterprise Support. We've received your request and a member of our team will be in touch soon for further assistance."
and then nothing else.
it took me like 6 weeks and 12 chat sessions to get Anthropic to essentially end the conversation with "Yeah, whoops, we'll forward that to the dev team." when they cut my max sub short by 4 hours.
that's the single reason I am no longer a customer. I don't feel like shoveling money at non-communicating phantoms.
4 hours of credit wasn't by any means worth the time, what irked me was the casual disregard for lost customer value.
I don’t know why you waited so long to submit this to the support forum they actually read, which is of course this one.
> I also wanted to confirm with a human on exactly what went wrong
They wouldn't be able to tell you. The entire back end system is probaby vibe-coded and nobody really understands what it does.
This is what credit card chargebacks are for.
I'm sure this guy would like to actually keep using Claude though instead of getting permanently banned.
Yep. I don't want to get blacklisted from using Claude indefinitely by doing a credit card chargeback.
Well, that's kinda the problem, isn't it? Even after being erroneously charged and ghosted by their non-existent support for a month, you'll still happily keep paying for their services.
If most people think like you, why indeed bother providing support at all?
Good point. I did actually cancel my Claude subscription a week or two ago, but I renewed it (regretfully) just the other day. The only other SOTA model that seems to be on-par with Opus 4.6 for engineering work is (maybe?) Codex 5.3, though I would rather not support Sam Altman indirectly.
What happened to voting with your wallet.
Corporate consolidation.
Then get fucked in the wallet I guess ?
Use another CC and email address?
Stripe's pretty good at using other signals to block this sort of thing.
I did a chargeback against OpenAI for something similar and I showed my credit card company the logs with the support bot, as it was my only point of contact for the company.
Have you tried suieng then in small claims court? They skimp in being a real company with real legal support by burning infestor capital, because staff attorney salaries are accounted for much harder than individualized lawsuits from practices not directly resolved next lay period.
Most people who commit wire fraud weren't socially bullied and criticized enough before their professional positions to keep in line legally. Useless failures.
Yes this would have been the first thing I would have jumped to after a week of no reply.
Then you get to show up with a sheriff at their office and confiscate equipment.
You don't get to steal people's money because you're busy trying to destroy human employment.
I didnt know that they have any useful support at all! :-D
I sent them some feedbacks one some issues, actually good ideas, and I didnt get any response so far.
I wouldn't hold your breath. It seems like the only way to get an actual human response is by complaining on Twitter/X and hoping that Boris Cherny responds. https://x.com/bcherny
I even wrote it not only per email but also in the "in-chat feedback" system (you can add a text to a response)
Also on LinkedIn they are siltent - I reached out to one of their sales reps, no response.
Maybe in the end we will have "Google-class" support?
> I even wrote it not only per email but also in the "in-chat feedback" system
Yeah, I did the same. Before falling back to sending an email to support@mail.anthropic.com (which my blog post references), I had 3 separate Fin AI in-chat convos trying to get in touch with someone. All of them defaulted to the "ask for a refund" workflow that only applies for subscriptions and left me more frustrated than anything.
This is the risk of being a consumer in the AI world - companies are running extremely lean on real humans and are deferring support to AI chatbots with no real reasoning abilities...
Also an issue with scale - for example, Google having similar issues of not handling small, isolated cases.
Hope you get your money back!
Google is like this since ever, way before AI, so no, that's not the reason.
You can call Google and their support for business customers is personal and excellent.
Thanks, I hope so too!
If it's a money issue then file a charge back with your credit card. That generally gets someone's attention.
See the other commenter/thread that recommended I do this. I'm worried that by doing a chargeback, I will be blacklisted from using Anthropic's services, which I feel like is a reasonable assumption.
If the product is really so good that you're willing to let the vendor abuse and defraud you then just treat it as a cost of doing business and move on. Personally I wouldn't tolerate that, but I guess it's a matter of priorities.
Until they do start doing identity verification, I think you're good. Frankly, don't be a coward. If you're getting treated like this, why would you even want to use their services in the future?
> why would you even want to use their services in the future?
Uhhh my base case is you will be forced to or just be forgotten, not unlike not having a cell phone or a bank account.
Did you get the API credit? Maybe it's a wash?
I did get the API credit, but it was "only" $100 so I'm still ~$80 shy.
That will get their attention - to blacklist you from ever doing business again with them. People saying this is a nuclear option are telling this because they know what a charge back means for a business owner. So treat it like that.
FTC should enforce across all companies either a support level commensurate to revenues, or the ability for customers to force refunds automatically.
Same, I tested Claude Code CLI and it crapped out and took my money, and they haven't responded to my billing dispute yet. Meanwhile JetBrains replies within hours and Junie is LLM agnostic. I'm a huge fan of JetBrains for AI coding.
I asked the Gumroad support AI for a human.
It forwarded my request which was then answered by an open claw agent :/
Still waiting for a response two weeks later.
The Gumroad CEO infamously fired and rehired everyone as contractors, and worked for DOGE last year until his delusions were shattered. It seems that your experience doesn't come from nowhere.
Their support is non-existent. It's NOT suitable for enterprise.
Their response time is usually around a month IME, yes.
Ah, I wouldn't have written this blog post if I had known that that was the usual turnaround time. There should really be more transparency on when one should expect to hear back rather than the generic response of "a member of our team will be with you as soon as we can."
edit: albeit another commenter claims they have been waiting for 2 months...
Just enough time to have your chargeback denied by the bank.
Thinking it might be time to push for some laws to mandate companies have better systems to handle and address concerns that impact customers businesses and livelihoods.
This inability to reach and/or get things resolved through customer support channels seems endemic, and probably generally part of the enshittification trend as a whole.
TBF I'd probably pay some solicitor $50 to have them send a nicely worded letter after 2 weeks.
You're too kind for the company trying to steal from you - whether intentionally or by negligence, doesn't really matter.
Or the small claims court mentioned by someone else. Make sure to add your time and the cost of the representation.
The fact nothing has changed regarding their non-existent support within a year just shows where their priorities lie. And I will make the bold assumption that this situation will be unchanged after exactly one year.
Fin is actually Intercom’s branded agent, so if Anthropic is using their own model for support at all isn’t clear.
I was curious so I looked into it. Seems like my issues were encountered when Fin AI was running on Sonnet 4.0, though Fin AI's new model (Fin Apex 1.0) was rolled out ~2 weeks ago. https://www.intercom.com/blog/announcing-fin-apex-the-age-of...
I'm not surprised, I burn (on purpose) more than 15k$/month on Anthropic tokens and I've never been able to talk to any of their sales despite filling the contact form every week for the past 4 months :')
You're worth a whole department of claude subscribers which tells me they don't give a fuck about API users.
$15K/month? USD? Are we talking company funds or personal?
What do you want to buy?
If it’s cheaper tokens…don’t expect a call…
at least, until your monthly usage slips.
Large corporations have been downsizing on QA and CS roles since before the LLM era. For many of those companies the lack of proper QA leads to more problems for users which compounds the lack of available CS staff. It's called either enshittification or maximizing shareholder value, can't remember which.
Why not both? ;)
I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad then that I have a ticket open that I keep updating every few days with how long it’s been without a response. It’s only been a few weeks.
if this is on a credit card you can get the money back from the credit card company for "undelivered goods"
I canceled my Rackspace Email account, in February, and they keep sending me "past due" notices.
I responded to the last one with "This account was canceled. If you persist in this harassment, I will open a case with the NYSAG."
We've been trying to get a Claude Code subscription for my company, the pricing page says $25 but they actually charge £25, 34% higher. I've been trying to talk to them for months, their support people don't even read what I'm saying and insist that it's somehow because of proration.
I'm fairly sure their billing backend is vibe-coded and their support is worse than Google's.
This sucks but is not surprising at all. Anthropic has more demand than it could ever fulfill, and looking into support tickets asking for refunds is never going to get anyone’s attention. If you actually want the money back, assuming you live in the US, this is what small-claims court is for.
The fact that denizens of HN think that taking a company to small-claims court is a reasonable approach to getting refunds :: SMH
Once again [0], Anthropic does not care about you and they are not your friends.
The other day Dario and Co, were looking at a robotic lamp that does your laundry and folds your clothes. He cares more about investing in that than your billing issue.
To them, they see us as gambling addicts, whilst we pay them their overpriced credits at their casino.
The house (Anthropic) always wins.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679322