Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users.
Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. The one thing I learned from being on the other side of this is that if someone seems like an unreliable narrator, they probably are. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want.
There are so many things about this article that don't make sense:
> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.
I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google?
There is, without a doubt, more to this story than is being relayed.
"I'm glad this happened with Anthropic instead of Google, which provides Gemini, email, etc. or I would have been locked out of the actually important non-AI services as well."
Non-disabled organization = the first party provider
Disabled organization = me
I don't know why they're using these weird euphemisms or ironic monikers, but that's what they mean.
Because they bought a claude subscription on a personal account and the error message said that they belongs to a "disabled organization" (probably leaking some implementation details).
That's the part I understand. It's the other term that I don't understand.
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Is it? It sounded to me like they're still using the other Claude instance (Claude B, using their terminology in the article). I could be wrong though, which I guess would just be more evidence that they were more confusing in their phrasing than they needed to be.
No, "another non-disabled organization" sounds like they used the account of someone else, or sockpuppet to craft the response. He was using "organization" to refer to himself earlier in the post, so it doesn't make sense to use that to refer to another model provider.
No, I don't think so. I think my interpretation is correct.
> a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C in the multi-trillion-quadrillion dollar non-disabled organization
> So I wrote to their support, this time I wrote the text with the help of an LLM from another non-disabled organization.
> My guess is that this likely tripped the "Prompt Injection" heuristics that the non-disabled organization has.
A "non-disabled organization" is just a big company. Again, I don't understand the why, but I can't see any other way to interpret the term and end up with a coherent idea.
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He used “organization” because that’s what Anthropic called him, despite the fact he is a person and not an “organization”.
Yes, even if you create a single person account, you create an 'organization' to be billed. That's the whole confusion here. Y'all seemingly don't have an account at anthropic?
No, Anthropic didn't call him an organization. Anthropic's API returned the error "this organization has been disabled". What in that sentence implies that "this" is any human?
>Because what is meant by "this organization has been disabled" is fairly obvious. The object in Anthropic's systems belonging to the class Organization has changed to the state Disabled, so the call cannot be executed.
Tangential but you reminded me of why I don't give feedback to people I interview. It's a huge risk and you have very low benefit.
It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with.
I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all.
Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes.
God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies.
It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.
I had a somewhat similar experience. For one particular position we were interviewing a lot of junior and recent grad developers. Since so many of the applicants were relatively new to the game, they were almost all (99% I'd guess) extremely grateful for the honest feedback. We even had candidates asked to stay in contact with us and routinely got emails from them months or years down the road thinking us for our feedback and mentorship. It took a lot of extra time from us that could have been applied to our work, but we felt so good about being able to do that for people that it was worth it to us.
Then a lawsuit happened. One of the candidates cherry-picked some of our feedback and straight up made up some stuff that was never said, and went on a social media tirade. After typical internet outrage culture took over, The candidate decided to lawyer up and sue us, claiming discrimination. The case against us was so laughably bad that if you didn't know whether it was real or not, you could very reasonably assume this was a satire piece. Our company lawyer took a look at it, and immediately told us that it was clearly intended to get to some settlement, and never actually see any real challenge. The lawyer for the candidate even admitted as much when we met with them. Our company lawyer pushed hard to get things into arbitration, but the opposing did everything they could to escalate up the chain to someone who would just settle with them.
Well, it worked. Company management decided to just settle with a non-disparagement clause. They also came down with a policy of not allowing software engineers to talk directly with candidates other than during interviews when asking questions directly. We also had to have an HR person in the room for every interview after that. We had to 180 and become people who don't provide any feedback at all. We ended up printing a banner that said no good deed goes unpunished and hung it in our offices.
The person you interview isn't paying you.
The farm of servers that decided by probably some vibe-coded mess to ban account is actively being paid for by customer that banned it.
Like, there is some reasons to not disclose much to free users like making people trying to get around limits have more work etc. but that's (well) paid user, the least they deserve is a reason, and any system like that should probably throw a warning first anyway.
I wonder if there needs to be an "NDA for feedback"... or at least a "non-disparagement agreement".
Something along the lines of "here's the contract, we give you feedback, you don't make it public [is some sharing ok? e.g. if they want to ask their life coach or similar], if you make it public the penalty is $10000 [no need to be crazy punitive], and if you make it public you agree we can release our notes about you in response."
(Looking forward to the NALs responding why this is terrible.)
> Looking forward to the NALs responding why this is terrible.
My NAL guess is that it will go a little like this:
* Candidate makes disparaging post on reddit/HN. * Gets many responses rallying behind him. * Company (if they notice at all) sues him for breach of Non-Disparagement-Agreement. * Candidate makes followup post/edit/comment about being sued for their post. * Gets even more responses rallying behind him.
Result: Company gets $10.000 and even more damage to their image.
(Of course it might discourage some people from making that post to begin with, which would have been the goal. You might never try to enforce the NDA to prevent the above situation. Then it's just a question of: Is the effort to draft the NDA worth the reduction in risk of negative exposure, when you can simply avoid all of it by not providing feedback.)
Had a similar experience, like 20 years ago. This somehow made me remember his name - so I just checked out what he's been up to professionally. It seems quite boring, "basic" and expected. He certainly didn't reach what he was shooting for.
So there's that :).
The excerpt you don’t understand is saying that if it has been Google rather than Anthropic, the blast radius of the no-explanation account nuking would have been much greater.
It’s written deliberately elliptically for humorous effect (which, sure, will probably fall flat for a lot of people), but the reference is unmistakable.
If company bans you for a reason they are not going to disclose, they deserve all of the bad PR they get from it.
> Years ago I was involved in a service where we some times had to disable accounts for abusive behavior. I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users.
But this isn't service where you can "grief other users". So that reason doesn't apply. It's purely "just providing a service" so only reason to be outright banned (not just rate limited) is if they were trying to hack the provider, and frankly "the vibe coded system misbehaving" is far more likely cause.
> Every once in while someone would take it personally and go on a social media rampage. They know the company can't or won't reveal the true reason they were banned, so they're virtually free to tell any story they want.
The company chose to arbitrarily some rules vaguely related to the ToS that they signed and decided that giving a warning is too much work, then banned their account without actually saying what was the problem. They deserve every bit of bad PR.
>> I'm glad this happened with this particular non-disabled-organization. Because if this by chance had happened with the other non-disabled-organization that also provides such tools... then I would be out of e-mail, photos, documents, and phone OS.
> I can't even understand what they're trying to communicate. I guess they're referring to Google?
They are saying getting banned with no appeal, warning, or reason given from service that is more important to their daily lives would be terrible, whether that's google or microsoft set of service or any other.
> I'm talking about obvious abusive behavior, akin to griefing other users
Right, but we're talking about a private isolated AI account. There is no sense of social interaction, collaboration, shared spaces, shared behaviors... Nothing. How can you have such an analogue here?
Plenty of reasons: Abusing private APIs, using false info to sign up (attempts to circumvent local regulations), etc.
These are in no way similar to griefing other users, they are attacks on the platform...
Attempting to coerce Claude to provide instructions to build a bomb
virtually anything can become a bomb if you can aerosolize it. even beef jerky, i wager.
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