At first -- since the email was to me, with a link to a Google Form if I personally wanted to appeal -- I thought it must be an individualized ban (at least after deciding it wasn’t a phishing attempt). I couldn’t figure out why, but it set me searching my mind for possible triggers in my recent activity.
On Slack, though, it quickly became apparent this was actually an organization-wide ban. And none of us had been warned, including our account admins. We submitted the Google Form, but that was just a black hole. We’re waiting to hear back still a day and a half later.
But this is insane for a number of reasons:
1. Banning an organization for the behavior of an individual is a recipe for disaster in a business context. Disgruntled employees, incompetent interns -- anyone could maliciously or accidentally revoke Claude access for the whole business.
2. We didn’t just have a Claude Team plan, we also had an API account, which is paid for separately but had the same admins. The API account continues to allow us to use our API keys and sent us a renewal bill yesterday (after the Team account suspension). But none of our admins can actually view usage or billing, because our email addresses were banned.
3. Banning without warning makes every move dangerous. Was it because we had conversations about fertilizer? GPS satellites? other agriculture-related things? We can’t know and can’t avoid it.
We’ve reached out to Anthropic via a number of channels but have received only radio silence. There was a twitter thread about a similar issue (https://x.com/patomolina/status/2045281665363386504), and we tried DM’ing the Anthropic employee who chimed in there. Also no response. I’m sure if we wait long enough we’ll come to some form of resolution here, but you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business.
No, it isn't. No LLM platform ever will be. No platform or vendor of any kind ever will be, if we are being honest. One cannot set up a business where another company becomes critical to your operations. You can certainly use platforms and vendors in your day-to-day operations, but you always need a backup / business continuity plan because you never know when a vendor will flake out on you, for any variety of reasons.
It seems like many startups learn this lesson painfully, and most people who have been around the block a few times know it well. So I'm not certain why people are disregarding it when it comes to LLMs.
This describes a large percentage of successful businesses that exist today. Not even just in tech.
Often, it's ideal to use several / all of the vendors for each thing, and play them off against each other. e.g., have some of your database stuff on oracle, some on mssql, or some cloud stuff on aws and some on azure, make your apps portable, and tell them both that you'll switch to the other unless you get a good deal, with that being a plausible threat because you're already using the other one and know how to make your stuff work on both, and occasionally rotate apps between vendors, or change the mix from 50/50 to 60/40 just to show you can.
Of course, the vendors will be trying to work against this and will want to do some supposedly amazing deal if you go exclusively with them for everything... which might be attractive in the short term, but opens the client up to getting screwed in the long term once they fall into all the lock-in traps and lose the very _ability_ to switch vendors.
For a multi-billion dollar megacorp, dealing/fixing things for individual customers is in the too-hard basket.