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HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
181–190 of 568 posts
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#182https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
After going public and getting publicity. You shouldn't have to do that just to get a company to fix their own mistake. They stole $200, where do they get off saying they won't give it back?
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#183https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
Because it hit HN frontpage ...
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.
^ This. I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me…
I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#185> 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. This is very surprising. I've never seen a legitimate business not give refunds for technical errors of their own fault. Minimum Anthropic should credit the full amount to them.
This billing cycle my account was billed an extra $200.
I investigated. I was being for a Claude Max gift subscription that has been sent to – what appears to be – a randomly generated 27 char alphanumeric icloud email account that bounces.
Apparently, Anthropic doesn't have a centralized process that allows you to approve, see or revoke "gift cards." And no I can't use this hypothetical gift card. Because I can't see what the system generated, when it generated it, and if the "gift" sent to this 27 character alphanumeric string was redeemed.
Their support bot doesn't work. As it's a possibly suspicious charge (I certainly didn't buy it), I've been trying to get them to revoke it. But the bot passes it to a human and their humans just close the ticket without comment.
I realize that people working at Anthropic are "just" researchers building cutting edge models. And that Claude is really great and all. But hasn't anyone told them about the global legal risk of incorrectly billing millions of people?
What is their legal risk team doing? Their ops team? Or, whoever else is responsible. Even their own models, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.5 and so on will flag this as a legal risk on "max" thinking.
Because even if $200M to $20M seems "insignificant" next to the however many billions they made in the quarter. Knowingly perpetuating fraudulent billing practises is a real legal risk with real prosecutorial (and financial) consequences. It's absurd to me that so much of legal risk analysis fixates on how users use the tools they pay for, but not what's an obvious trigger for class action lawsuits and prosecutorial investigations in most jurisdictions.
This isn't even a threat. The FTC has taken Uber to court, https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2... and is apparently seeking a few billion in fines?
https://www.independent.co.uk/us/money/uber-lawsuit-fines-bi...
Purposeful unauthorized billing was found to be fraudulent and defendants were made to fork over assets, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
And this is government action in one jurisdiction. The EU has fines of 6% of global turnover, and yes, they too will seize assets if the fines are unpaid.
What I'm trying to say politely is, does the Anthropic team realize this is an insane legal risk. And to quote Trevor Moore's immortal words, "insanely illegal."
Why would you do this? Does anyone realize the implications of this? At all? Other than the AI models that the humans aren't paying attention to?
screenshots for anyone interested, https://x.com/_areoform/status/2048644232043434354
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#186"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." Not sure I've ever seen a company openly take this position. This is a crazy policy.
Well, when your policy is written by an AI, you can get shit like that
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#187https://x.com/trq212/status/2048495545375990245 He is getting a refund along with an additional $200 credit from what I can see.
Yeah the initial response is stupid but this is getting resolved, not sure where the initial response OP gives in his git issue came from tbh. I only skimmed the git issue, perhaps they clarified.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised UK law doesn't prohibit retaliation against the customer for insisting on his legal rights. Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.
Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.
Being able to freely threaten reprisal against people exercising their rights circumvents those rights.
Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#189Another slop coded piece of shit causing stupid bugs.
I can’t believe they paid 100m for some of these employees. They could have bought entire companies of real developers.
Re: HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
#190I wonder how this kind of response from Anthropic is actually being read by the community at large. If you consider the rough sentiment of the r/ClaudeCode subreddit against the r/Codex subreddit, you can see that there is a definite loudness among the folks departing ClaudeCode for Codex. Something big is shifting on the ground, I think.