The tide is turning very much in the direction of OpenAI and Codex. To top it all off, Anthropic’s customer treatment met an all time low this week.
Anthropic had a massive failure on api usage in Claude Code. It all originated on this Github issue last week. A user had a commit message with the string HERMES.md in it and because of this it rerouted claude api requests to the “extra usage” billing. This meant the user silently burned through $200 in extra usage credits while his Max 20x plan capacity remained largely untouched (13% weekly usage).
If you’re not aware, Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent framework — competition basically — and this is why Claude code had this check in their code. Basically, if you even try to use their models with anything other than Claude code they’re going to charge you through the nose.
There also have been reports that the same thing happened if you had OpenClaw in a json blob on any recent commit.
Boris “Coding is largely solved” Cherny closed the issue himself stating “Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.”
The user shared the reply he actually received:
Let me look up your account information to help process your refund request.
I sincerely apologize for the disruption you experienced with the billing routing issue. We take service reliability very seriously.
However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical errors that result in incorrect billing routing. We are consistently working on improvements to our infrastructure to better handle these types of issues and prevent similar problems from happening in the future.
Thank you for your patience and for taking the time to document this issue so thoroughly. Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable for our engineering team.”
No refund. Two “Thank you”s but no refund.
However, I need to let you know that we are unable to issue compensation for degraded service or technical errors that result in incorrect billing routing.
No compensation for technical errors?! How is this even possible? Then the kick in the face at the end:
Your detailed reproduction steps will be valuable for our engineering team.
I can imagine the user was delighted he could be of service to a company now worth in the realms of $900B. Let me spell that out with all the zeros:
According to Google, only about 15–20 countries (yes COUNTRIES) have a GDP higher than that.
Yet, they have glaring bugs in their products, freely admit it and then say they can’t compensate $200 for something that was blatantly their fault.
This is totally unacceptable.
Obviously the comments on the Github issue and over on X were outraged at Anthropic’s behaviour and rightly so. Many users stating they had already cancelled their subscriptions and are moving over to Codex.
Anthropic Comes Through Far Too Late
Eventually Anthropic got their act together and issued refunds to all effected users. However, this took the company around 5 days and they likely only did it due to all the bad press they were getting. The tone of the apology Tweet came across as making excuses and no mention of how terrible the treatment of their users were.
“ugh sorry this was a bug with the 3rd party harness detection and how we pull git status into the system prompt. we’re reaching out to affected users and giving them a refund + another month of credits (in this case another $200)”
This is too little, too late. This is not how you rectify such a situation. There are basics in customer service that even the most junior of representatives understand:
- Listen, understand, empathise
- Collaborate and communicate
- Take responsibility and make it right
Anthropic ignored almost all of this. They sent out a generic message — obviously written by AI — with an unacceptable solution. Only when they started getting bad publicity did they start to do anything and even then it was the bear minimum.
Conclusion
Anthropic is falling from grace. And fast.
Regardless what business you run, if you want to stick around for the long term then how you treat your customers is critical. Without customers your business will fail — no exception — and customers will only tolerate bad treatment for so long, regardless of how good your product is.
In recent weeks Anthropic has not had a good time of it. The source code for Claude code being leaked, issues with their pricing and the poor reception of Claude Opus 4.7.
I’m not sure what is going on over at Anthropic but the ship is veering off course whilst OpenAI seems to have steadied itself and it making quiet and steady progress.
Giants have fallen many times before, just ask Kodak, Blockbuster and Nokia. It doesn’t take much time at all to go from seemingly invincible to total obscurity and in this modern AI world I would imagine it can happen even faster. Anthropic better start sorting this stuff out soon or otherwise it’s going to get much worse.
