Anthropic banned me for "suspicious signals"

02 Sep, 2026

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.

Wait, so what am I paying for here?

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.

The nail in the coffin

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