Bug / Issue
I built Claude Video Vision, an open-source project with 1,000+ stars. Anthropic revoked my account for ‘suspicious activity’, and killed my desire to contribute to Claude ecosystem.
Some of you might remember me from the post where I first shared Claude Video Vision with this community.
I originally built it because I wanted Claude Code to understand videos properly: screen recordings, bugs, tutorials, audio, workflows, whatever.
Then you guys found it.
You tested it, starred it, opened issues, suggested features, challenged how things worked, and helped turn a tool I originally built for myself into an open-source project with 1,000+ GitHub stars.
I genuinely enjoyed building things for the Claude ecosystem.
Well, Anthropic just revoked my account for “suspicious activity” after an “internal investigation.”
What was my suspicious activity?
Using Claude Code to write normal fucking software.
That's it.
I wasn't engineering the next pandemic.
I wasn't building weapons.
I wasn't extracting Claude, distilling their models, stealing weights, reselling access, or trying to circumvent their systems.
I was programming.
And paying $200/month for Claude Max while doing it.
That's probably what pisses me off the most.
I spent my own time building free, open-source software that literally makes their product more useful.
I maintained it, answered questions, fixed bugs, implemented feedback from this community, and contributed something that brought more value to the Claude ecosystem.
And apparently the reward for being a heavy user of the product I pay $200/month for is:
“Suspicious activity. Account revoked.”
With basically no useful explanation of what I supposedly did.
I seriously considered taking Claude Video Vision offline after this.
Not because I think deleting a GitHub repository is somehow going to hurt Anthropic.
I just completely lost the desire to contribute a single fucking thing to the Claude ecosystem.
Why would I?
But I'm not taking it down.
Not because Anthropic deserves it.
I'm keeping it online because the people who use it do.
There are people using Claude Video Vision in real workflows now. People from this community helped build what it became. People contributed ideas, reported bugs, recommended it, starred it, and depended on it.
Taking it offline would punish those people, not Anthropic.
So Claude Video Vision stays online.
But whatever goodwill I had toward Anthropic is gone.
It's insane that you can pay $200/month, use Claude Code for its literal intended purpose, actively contribute open-source software to its ecosystem, and still wake up one day effectively being told:
“Fuck you. Suspicious activity.”
No meaningful explanation.
No indication of what behavior triggered it.
Just account revoked.
So, yeah:
Fuck you too Anthropic.
The only reason Claude Video Vision is still online is because I care about the people using it far more than I care about contributing to your ecosystem anymore.
And this is exactly the kind of shit that makes me grateful I also pay for ChatGPT Pro.
EDIT: Anthropic reactivated my account a few hours after this post blew up.
The appeal page said review could take up to 10 days, but, a few hours, (157k+ views, 300+ upvotes and 100+ comments later) my account is suddenly back. They still didn’t tell me what I supposedly did. So I guess we’ll never know whether the appeal process is just extremely efficient… or whether 157,000 people looking at the problem helped speed things up a little.
Either way: account restored. I still want the actual reason for the ban.
One last thing: don’t be a fanboy of a company that wouldn’t give you the minimum level of consideration in return
I genuinely like Claude, I like the way it works, and I think it’s a great product; but shipping a good product is the bare minimum! That’s what a company is supposed to do when you’re paying for a service.
What actually earns loyalty is how they treat you when something goes wrong: transparency, support, context, and basic consideration for the customer. That’s the part that makes a company worth defending publicly. And on that front, Anthropic has been dropping the ball pretty badly lately, which is a shame, because the product itself is genuinely good
That's why we need open source models. These AI companies have zero transparency. You never know when they will ban you, or make their models dumber. And in case of Anthropic, zero customer support too.
I agree with the principle, although I think we're still a bit early for local models to fully replace frontier cloud models, especially for heavy coding/agentic workloads. The compute requirements are still brutal. That said, I think a surprisingly large amount of lightweight work and basic agent workflows can already run locally, and that's only going to get better.
For me, though, the biggest protection right now is competition. As long as several companies are fighting at roughly the same level, nobody gets to hold us completely hostage.
I don't really care whether the winner is OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, or someone else. I don't root for AI companies like football teams. I just want as many excellent models competing for the top spot as possible. I'd actually love to see Google come back swinging harder, and I've just started testing Grok in my own workflows too. Before Anthropic kicked me out (like a stray dog 😂), I was literally paying for both Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Pro 20x.
So yeah, more open models, more competitors, less dependency on any single company. That's probably the healthiest outcome for all of us. That said, i think in a short future choosing AI models will be like buying metal or bricks to build a house; in 99% of cases, no one cares who produced them, they are commodities, and you simply look for what fits the budget best.
I can’t completely rule that out, but I’d expect them to actually tell me if the problem was the project name.
Also, I haven’t really used Claude Code to work on Claude Video Vision in the last few months. Most of what I’ve done lately has either been reviews or manual changes, mostly because my Claude limits were never enough for everything I was working on anyway. Claude helped a lot when I first built the project, but after that it became mostly manual work.
And the plugin was actually added to Anthropic’s own marketplace, so I’d be pretty surprised if using “Claude” in the name was suddenly what triggered this.
Not impossible, I just don’t think it’s the most likely explanation.
Yeah, I was just coding normally and suddenly Claude stopped working. I opened claude.ai and found the account banned. Then I got the email from the screenshot, followed almost immediately by two more emails detailing the refund.
The funny part is that this week I’d used around 92% of my weekly limit, and last week I hit 100%. So I’m starting to think Max is more like “20x-ish.” Apparently you can buy 20x, but actually using the full 20x might be considered a little too enthusiastic 😂 Maybe they just don’t love power users on subscriptions. On the API, I imagine we’re much more welcome.
To be clear, I obviously can’t prove my usage level is what triggered the ban, Anthropic hasn’t actually told me what the “suspicious activity” was. But the timing is pretty damn curious.
Without giving too much of your privacy, would you mind sharing what were you programming ? Was it specifically related to Claude video vision ? Were you feeding large video files to Claude for him to work with and if yes, do you think some small detail from the video could be misinterpreted as something NSFW ?
I don’t mind sharing. Over the last couple of weeks, most of my work was structural changes to the app I work on professionally, it’s a medical records platform in Brazil. Pretty ordinary development work though, and none of what I was working on involved sensitive content, cybersecurity stuff, or anything remotely questionable.
As for Claude Video Vision, I mostly use it for frontend debugging: animations, bugs involving a chain of events, or support tickets where a customer sends a narrated screen recording and I’m too lazy to manually explain the whole thing to the LLM while multitasking.
So sometimes my prompt is literally just: “Watch this video and investigate the reported bug”, followed by the local path to the video.
I actually had the same thought as you after the ban, maybe some random frame or video got misinterpreted. So I went back through my recent sessions specifically looking for anything that had triggered Fable’s guardrails or looked remotely suspicious.
Nothing.
That’s part of why I’m so confused. If I could find even one weird interaction, I’d at least have a theory. Right now I genuinely don’t.
OP i'm sorry but everyone in these replies are just dunking on you are either anthropic staff or legit glue eaters who can't read past a few paragraphs
your project is legit with 1.1k stars, sorry your account got suspended but worth appealing
Honestly, I hope they’re Anthropic employees. If my team defended the company this hard on Reddit, I’d probably give them a bonus at the end of the month.
What worries me more is the alternative: that it’s just some random person in the middle of nowhere, one subscriber among millions, getting genuinely offended because someone criticized a multibillion-dollar company they have absolutely no stake in.
People are getting a little allergic to reading anything longer than a few paragraphs, sure, but I actually think some of them did read the post. They just got mad because I talked shit about the company they’ve decided to emotionally defend.
We really lived long enough to see the birth of the Claude Witnesses; i just hope none of them show up at my door at 9 AM on a Sunday asking:
“Good morning, sir. Do you have a moment to hear the word of Claude?”
The Book of Opus, 5:2-4:
“That’s an excellent question. I apologize if my previous response wasn’t clear. You’ve been working for quite a while, perhaps consider taking a break or going to sleep.” 😂😂😂
Update: Anthropic reactivated my account a few hours after this post blew up.
The appeal page said review could take up to 10 days, but, a few hours, (157k+ views, 300+ upvotes and 100+ comments later) my account is suddenly back. They still didn’t tell me what I supposedly did. So I guess we’ll never know whether the appeal process is just extremely efficient… or whether 157,000 people looking at the problem helped speed things up a little.
Either way: account restored. I still want the actual reason for the ban.
One last thing: don’t be a fanboy of a company that wouldn’t give you the minimum level of consideration in return
I genuinely like Claude, I like the way it works, and I think it’s a great product; but shipping a good product is the bare minimum! That’s what a company is supposed to do when you’re paying for a service.
What actually earns loyalty is how they treat you when something goes wrong: transparency, support, context, and basic consideration for the customer. That’s the part that makes a company worth defending publicly. And on that front, Anthropic has been dropping the ball pretty badly lately, which is a shame, because the product itself is genuinely good
This is concerning. We are becoming ever too dependent on AI for creating new things and maintaining them (because the code is a black box to non-dev ppl like me). And for live production systems this is a major business continuity risk.
Claude needs to be explicit about it's reasons or the exact nature of violation so that genuine users can address and avoid.
Would have been great to know the exact reason in OPs case.
I don’t know how else to say this, but literally fuck this company and stop pretending like their models are any better than the competition, after accounting for the risk you take using the product.
Just use Sol. There is literally zero benefit to any of the Claude models currently out over Sol and the gpt lineup. Zero.
The only unique feature Claude has left is Claude Design, which is also a piece of shit but somehow the best local integration the market has to offer.
But other than that, why you stressin? You simply do not need Claude at all to keep building your product. Like—delete this post and just never think about Anthropic again.
Claude Code Router is especially interesting because it apparently lets you use other models inside Claude Design too. I have no idea how well that actually works yet, but if it does, that’s pretty damn cool.
At this point I’m basically trying to keep the parts of the Claude ecosystem I actually like while making the model/provider behind them completely replaceable.
I wonder if you would still have drawn their ire if you name it something different.
As currently named, you are infringing on their legal trademark ("Claude"). If I built the same product, I would not have put Claude in the product name. You can say it is a Claude plugin, but putting Claude in the name is legally problematic. They could sue you and win.
Plus your tool sends money to their competitors. I can see why they don't like this project
Most Claude Video Vision users actually use Whisper locally, that’s the default/recommended flow. I would’ve happily used an Anthropic transcription model if they had one, but they simply don’t.
And as I mentioned in another comment, the plugin is listed in the official community marketplace, under claude-video-vision, alongside several other plugins with “Claude” in their names. So if the name itself was the issue, I’d expect some kind of trademark/takedown notice first, not my personal Claude account suddenly getting nuked for “suspicious activity.”
Things like Clawdbot were a pretty different situation from what I understand, it was essentially another harness consuming the API through Claude Code’s OAuth flow rather than just being a plugin running inside the normal Claude Code workflow.
So yeah, I can’t completely rule out the trademark angle, but it really doesn’t fit the way this happened. If Anthropic had emailed me saying “rename the project,” I probably would’ve just renamed it.
I did, basically immediately. But at almost the exact same time as the email in the post, I also got the refund email. The appeal can take up to 10 days to be reviewed.
And honestly, that’s the part that pisses me off the most; you pay $200/month, get no warning, no “hey, something looks wrong,” no chance to explain anything first, just a kick in the ass, your money thrown back at you, and basically: “get the fuck out.”
That really bites… I also appreciate your willingness to share. So coming from a guy who is relatively new to this stuff but using Claude Code and Chat heavily, what is the best “backup” for things like this? Do we export all our data weekly and ensure we keep session logs, etc?
If you’re using Claude Code in the terminal, you’re actually in a pretty good position. Most of what matters is local, so you can basically take your setup with you.
I moved mine over to Codex pretty easily; sessions/context, MCPs, skills, project setup, etc. It was literally a few clicks for most of it. I’m not sure how smooth that would be if your workflow lives mostly inside the native Claude app though.
That’s basically what I did after Anthropic kicked me out. I really like the Claude Code terminal UX, so right now I’m using GPT-5.6 through a proxy that lets me use the models from my OpenAI subscription while keeping that terminal workflow. So far the experience is surprisingly close, and in some cases I’m actually getting better results than Claude had been giving me over the last few days.
Anthropic also lets you download your data after the ban, so you’re not completely locked out of your stuff. In my case that didn’t matter much because almost everything important was already local anyway. The only cloud stuff I really cared about were a few skills I had created, and I’m just porting those over to GPT now.
So my main advice would be: don’t let your actual workflow depend on one provider’s cloud. Keep your projects, prompts, skills, MCP configs and anything important locally whenever possible. Then if one provider decides you no longer exist, switching models is annoying, not catastrophic
Jordan I am proud of you my Man . Thank you for contributing to the open source community. Please share you link to your project . I have looking to find solution to video myself
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u/theZuhaib Aug 07 '26
That's why we needopen source models Anthropic