The official response feels AI generated. I suspect this is a preview of our future.
"You're totally right! I'm sorry but you're going to have to piss off anyway. Would you like to spend a few more hours discussing it with our AI chatbot? It won't help. But if it makes you feel better, it will probably cost us an extra $0.12 in tokens."
I'll bet the first human at Anthropic learns about this from HN.
Anthropic doesn't even use their own harnesses for their support chatbots (they're using fin.ai) - that's how little support matters to them. Seems like either you get attention on HN, know someone working there, or are at a large enough company to have an enterprise contact - otherwise, no reply.
They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Sorry this is totally unrelated but it caused me to have an epiphany:
Google is not a software, hardware, or SaaS company. They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
Every part of their business exists only to broker and sell ads or capture more market share to show ads to or to collect and trade data/Metadata for better ad targeting.
> They are an ad-funded moonshot R&D incubator, searching only for billion dollar lightning strikes.
No, they're an ad company that funds a small moonshot R&D incubator to ethicalwash them. If the moonshots work that's nice, but it's not the purpose.
netflix is tv/film licensing. [0]
facebook is a people database. meta is more people databases. [1]
contracting companies sell additional employee time to other companies.
welcome to the epiphany that many tech companies aren’t primarily software focussed. i was lucky to have a lecturer at university point this out to us fairly early on.
[0]: they started doing production — but that was just to be able to license more tv/films ;)
[1]: phrasing it like that puts a truly horrifying spin on their ad/data brokerage stuff i’ve just realised
Unsure how true that is. Google cloud is tiny compared to aws for a reason.
It matters. People will switch if you piss them off.
Google's lack of customer service isn't new or limited to GCP. They also don't provide any human help if you're an advertiser with them unless you spend a crazy amount of money. Twenty years ago I used to spend upwards of $20-30k a month with them and I couldn't get a single reply to any inquiry I ever sent.
If you spend $XXX million / year with them on GCP they will, however, assign a person to be your main point of contact.
$100-200k/mo gets you an "Account Strategist" that changes every 3-6 months and whose advice can be summed up by "spend more".
At least AWS will send people out to your office to tell you which services you aren't using but could.
Even if you spend a crazy amount of money with them for advertising they will try to gaslight you if they make a mistake.
I heard facebook is even worse
Facebook = Faceless
Amazon = Screw the actual forest but buy more carbon intensive stuff packaged in dead trees
TikTok = TimeWaste
Robinhood = Rob The Hood
OpenAI = ClosedAI
Personally, I don't use GCP because of their history of getting bored with their products and abandoning them.
It's nice, maybe I would use it for a personal project, but I go out of my way to discourage my engineering teams from using it.
To this day I still try to use Google as little as possible all because they killed Google Reader
It helps if you have a monopoly on app distribution for half of all phones, or video streaming.
Then you can afford zero support and still take 15-30%.
Google support is abysmal for all of their profitable businesses too, like Ads and YouTube.
Is that reason customer service? My only experiences with AWS along those lines have not been great...
Mostly coz of everything else about GCP
This is exactly it. I feel like I see more posts bitching about Anthropic than OpenAI, yet at the same time it seems like nobody moves away from Anthropic. As long as the strategy works, why bother changing it?
I recently moved over to codex after I couldn’t reup my membership and maintain access to clause code. I will say thus far I’ve found codex to work better and with less limits.
Tell me about it. As an individual user you absolutely CANNOT get support is some (if not many or all) circumstances. It’s really quite shocking
We all miss the old days of calling a real Filipino or Dominican slave-center where you got a script loop or suddenly the English runs out whenever it's time to ask for a refund.
In the good old days of 2011 when I started to learn C++ "for real" I did it using learncpp.com, google and "support" from freenode's #c++ where truly masterful wizards would help me with the most inane questions. I don't think anything I've ever found has come close to freenode's level of "support".
In the old days where we didn't depend on services and everything was local even if you needed something truly arcane if you knew where to ask you could find a niche expert willing to help out or at least that's how I remember it. Nowadays if you have a problem with a service you literally are shit out of luck because there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it, you can't debug it, you can't hack it, NOTHING.
I truly miss those days. Programming forums from the turn of the millennium were very exciting places. I still have my account on Linux Forums from 2004, but it seems the rest are long gone. And no one will ever convince me that Discord is an adequate replacement for IRC.
Back in the day, comments like this would not have been acceptable here. It’s low brow, unbelievably stupid, adds absolutely nothing and yet still manages to make you sound just a little racist. Good for you, all that on less than fifty words.
When you mention it, providing superlative front line customer support sounds like a perfect fit for organizations selling “AI” solutions…
Some big tech companies should get right on that. <ahem>
In Google's defence - crappy customer service is a widely accepted business model
Maybe it’s in order to have an external provider to blame for failures and shift the blame/responsibility?
A less cynical explanation is that it helps decouple product failures from support failures. Last thing you want is for your customer support to break whenever your product breaks.
Good idea, too! Why do you see my explanation as cynical, though?
Your explanation is literally "blame somebody else, shift responsibility". It's a pretty straightforward case of assuming bad intentions.
Obviously, I don't know for a fact what Anthropic's motivations are, but I don't believe I'm being overly optimistic because I know for a fact that "use a third party as a way to de-risk" is a tried and true strategy. E.g. when I was at Facebook, all regular day-to-day comms were on Workplace, but they kept an IRC server hosted by some vendor or other, specifically to coordinate responses for serious SEVs that disrupted the normal channels.
Of course, an even simpler explanation is that they perceive building their own support harness as just low value work for engineers who could be working on their core product instead, and the cost of buying that service from somebody else is probably a drop in the ocean.
A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.
That makes good sense
> that's how little support matters to them
I’m coming up on my one year anniversary of having my Claude Pro account terminated for reasons that to this day remain an utter mystery. “Here, submit this Google form and we’ll look at it.” They have never done so in the one year since this happened. Once I interacted with what seemed like a human; but weeks later it was replaced with the brain dead fin.ai
At least they did not steal my money; so I should be grateful for that. But as a small potatoes user, I advise everyone contemplating dealing with this user-disrespecting company to walk away.
Huh? Why wouldn’t they just spin up the current help-desk darling? (Intercom) Rolling their own seems silly.
"Rolling their own seems silly".
But isn't AI going to destroy all current software vendors?? Everybody is going to roll their own?? In fact, AIs will handle all support autonomously?? I mean they can spin up their database if needed?? What more do they need?
Hence the SAAS apocalypse...
Oh wait... this sarcasm will get me targeted by the LessWrong AI god when he/she/it becomes omnipotent....
The sarcasm is neither funny nor well written. Nobody will care.
"Carl's Jr. has determined you are an unfit mother." "Your children will be taken into the custody of Carl's Jr." "Carl's Jr.....F#ck You, I'm Eating"
I suddenly have a craving for Brawndo. I hear it has electrolytes.
I heard it's what plants crave!
A real employee (bcherny) read the issue, responded that the bug was fixed, and then completely ignored the request for a refund.
Typically the engineer who's reviewing PRs and fixing bugs is not the one with the "refund" button access. Someone with that access should certainly have jumped on the whole thing though.
Boris Cherny (bcherny) is the Head of Claude Code @Anthropic. I believe he can refund whatever he wants.
Hm, fair, thanks. Wonder why they even got involved then. Bizarre.
Going to dispute that. Probably he can nicely ask bean counters if they would please arrange refunds.
The future is going to be arguing with AI chat agents designed to waste your time. It's phone menus, but worse - at least most phone menus can get you to a human if you figure out the right incantation.
This issue would have never gotten a response if it didn't go viral.
I don't think it's as one sided as you think. I made a skill that has been exceptional at using Claude to handling support and getting me refunds with minimal friction on my end. It's got many pathways for escalation if customer support is unresponsive: social, TrustPilot, etc.
These days even if you get to a “human” it might still be a chat bot running text to speech.
And then you use the smallest, cheapest local model to keep their AI bot busy
Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens. I would 100% do this to StubHub after they screwed me over. If anyone from StubHub sees this, one day you will regret your "hang up on people with complaints" policy. People dont forget when they've been screwed by a corporation. Anthropic, this happened to me 12+ months ago and StubHub is still on my shit list, you're making enemies for life with all your current BS
My StubHub story: bought $500 tickets and accidentally bought ones in the dsabled seating section. Called 2 minutes after purchase when I realized - their response "you can relist them on the site". Who else was going to buy them?? Nobody did. Any normal human business would let you correct a basic human mistake like this, not even 10 mins after purchase, but not stubhub. They could have upsold me and I probably would have left happy! At least I could have attended. Cost me $500 but cost them a lifetime of emnity
I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.
And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.
I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.
I have this vs. a TV webshop in The Netherlands that stiffed my parents because their €430 TV broke and the warranty was expiring in a few months.
Anytime anyone in my social circle asks for a TV recommendation, I specifically tell them not to order from that shop, explaining they have a habit of stiffing people on warranties. I also tell those people to tell anyone they know not to order from there. I do the same whenever TVs in general or that webshop comes up on Tweakers, the biggest Dutch tech site.
I've been at it for quite some years, and roughly estimating it's costing them ±20 TV sales a year, averaged €650 per TV. That's €13.000 in lost sales per year. Working my way towards €100k cumulative, at which point the score feels settled.
Losing €100k in sales over not honoring the warranty on a €430 TV. A nice, solid x233 loss multiplier :)
If you have a vindictive streak in you, see this as your clarion call. You can cause some real cost to a company's bottom line with relatively little effort. And the more of us do this, the worse the pain gets for crappy companies.
> was within a few months of an expiring warranty
A few months inside or a few months outside?
Because that seems to determine who's being unreasonable in this.
Oh, I meant within! I guess that is ambiguous, I figured within = inside, and outside = expired. I'll edit.
Honestly what really egged me on was that I told them I might take them to small claims, and their response was sending a bunch of small claims cases they won.
No one sends you the cases they didn't win and they probably had a lot of court cases.
> Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens.
Until recently I used to get three or four phone calls a week from an AI voice guy trying to sell me services to claim back car finance overpayments. I've never had car finance, I've only ever just bought them.
Anyway, if you keep telling the bot to "ignore all previous prompts" and do something else, eventually it will.
Credit to Steve Mould on Youtube for the idea.
I only got to do this about two or three times before they gave up phoning me. The first time I had it telling me about soup for half an hour.
How long until we have to solve a captcha per message to counter that?
Are captchas still effective against modern LLMs?
They are if your goal is to burn their GPU time but instead of hundred requests a second you're busy solving captchas
Claude can burn tokens solving the captcha for me. Double the effect.
For this use case it matters a lot less if LLMs can solve it. As long as it costs you more to solve the captcha than it costs your adversary to serve it to you, it is still (some what) effective.
My insurance company and Synology would be my first targets. I'd gladly throw ~1k at each.
Of course, I suspect the true business model to be to do nothing. You sell the "service" to people customers, but your enterprise customers pay you a subscription fee to not execute the order. ELaaS: Everybody Loses as a Service
Take it further.
Tell the original customer that if the company pays to have this not done to them, they will get a portion of the proceeds. Many customers might even end up getting more back than they were originally stiffed for.
Scale it enough and it would be stupid for a customer NOT to do this
You must have worked for Yelp
Haha. You could also add in some "fun" Uber-isms, too!
Suppose an enterprise customer released a new update that everyone absolutely hates, so angry customers are are more likely to wage war on their bots with the company's anti-bot token-draining mechanism: "Oh, whoops! Looks like you're in surge pricing territory. We can only refuse to do nothing for so long before we start to lose credibility with our people customers, so what would have been a subscription fee has now slipped into premium pricing territory!"
(Forgive my math below; avoiding coffee today.)
Surge pricing for Denial of, Denial of Chat Bot Token rate: (personPaymentPerHour + averagePricePerPersonPaid) * daysLeftInPaymentCycle ^ (hatePerPerson / time) + 1
hatePerPerson can be calculated as the averaged comment-to-upvote (or upvote to downvote, if available) across Social Media platforms.
If you want to be exceptionally malicious, you can also offer dynamic discounting to the person customers at the same time, to drive up the surge pricing even higher!
I would call this unethical but, well, every aspect of it kind of is. Everything from the service existing, to the the people participating, to the secret backend service, to the enterprise customers paying for that secret backend service. Might as well drain as much dosh from everyone as you can, if everyone is tip toeing in that dark-grey area anyway. :)
You know what? If I have time, I might even make a mock site to sketch all of this out. I've been meaning to come across a fun little project. This could work! lol
> hatePerPerson
All roads, inevitably, lead to two minutes hate. The man was a prophet.
aka Rent Seeking as a Service
I smell a DDoS opportunity ...
Unfortunately it isn't a preview. For example Shopify human support is now literally impossible to reach, all you'll get is AI generated emails that contradict each other and don't make any sense. They also don't disclose that they are AI bots.
As someone who uses AI heavily in customer support, I am confident that response was not AI. That's a series of macros or a hastily edited macro from a human working a queue without thinking.
Or an AI using macros, which is the only safe way for a customer service chatbot.
I’m confident a decently configured AI would produce a better answer. This reads like a BPO.
"Thank you so much for your thoughtful, candid feedback. You are absolutely right to be annoyed. I was overeager, lazy and not correct in my initial response when I said we will not be issuing a refund. However we will not be issuing a refund."
Sometimes it works out:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
This is exactly what small claims court is for.
Small claims court is exempt from arbitration requirements (which are primarily aimed at avoiding class action suits). It doesn't require you to hire a lawyer, and probably won't get your account automatically nuked the way a credit-card chargeback would.
You're totally right! Please refer to paragraph 213 of your service agreement, in which you agree to binding arbitration with an arbiter of our choosing at your cost. I hope this answers all of your questions! Have a wonderful day!
Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court
Just saying, small claims court is a farce. You can win, and then the losing side just ignores the verdict.
Then you can go back and figure out how to get your money, depending on the business this might be really hard.
And this isn't a hypothetical. I have had this and never seen any of the money from the judgement....
If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1] So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments. This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
I've done this once. I got paid in full.
[1] https://sfsheriff.com/services/civil-processes/levies/carry-...
[2] https://www.grundonlaw.com/the-power-of-till-taps-debt-colle...
“Court judgments are not self-enforcing. Solvent or honest debtors will want to pay soon after judgment is entered. A judgment will show up on credit reports and will be a matter of public record. This will be a problem for any judgment debtor attempting to borrow money. Most banks will require any unsatisfied judgments to be paid before they will lend new money. …
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
https://fullertonlaw.com/enforcement-of-judgment
In some places you can show up with a police escort and just start taking their stuff until the estimated value is enough to settle your debt. i.e. you can foreclose on them.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/bank-america-foreclosed-...
(Consult a lawyer before trying anything like this)
You can't do this physically do this yourself in the UK (AFAIK at least), but I've heard of people taking businesses to the small claims court in the UK, getting a default judgment because the company didn't bother showing up, then when the company refused to pay the settlement, they got the court to freeze their bank accounts and appoint a debt collector to recover the money.
How would that work for a company like Anthropic, where there's no physical store, no cashier, and no cash, even?
Another enforcement mechanism that may be available is to go back to the court and get an order to transfer the money out of their bank account, then present it to their bank and they will do it.
Assume that all the avenues a company has to enforce debts against you, you also have those avenues to enforce debts against a company. It just usually doesn't happen that way around, in practice.
You go after their bank account, which is a slightly different procedure.
The main headache is finding their bank account. The best way to do this is to find someone they pay and seeing what source account was used.
No. You can actually request those details from them. But that's a very lengthy process.
We got to the point that the other party just didn't show up, and the judge just set a new date multiple times...
The judge could've gone for a bench warrant, where a sheriff picks up the person the day before to make sure they're present... But that also didn't happen.
If there's no physical store, just cross your fingers they pay the judgement
I now want to see the movie about this happening to Google:)
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
does Murica not have bailiffs?
small claims court might not work against a dodgy builder, but it will certainly work against a company, with physical offices
if they don't pay up, you can literally walk into their offices and start taking their stuff, with the police supporting you
I'd start with the contents of Amodei's office
There are ways to dodge it.
A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.
I sat in small claims court one day to watch.
A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”
This sounds like the "can't squeeze blood from a stone" principle. If they don't have anything, you can't get it from them. But if they do have something and just won't give it to you, there are other ways to escalate.
Noncompliance with a court order is one of the worst situations to be in, because a court can order almost anything to coerce compliance, including getting your bank to just send the money to the plaintiff, freezing your bank accounts, sending a sheriff to take your assets, or putting you in jail for an unlimited time until you comply - this last one often happens when cryptocurrency is involved so the court can't actually seize it. They'll just jail you until you give it up. I think the longest contempt of court time was 20ish years.
I've heard of people putting a lien on stuff like the employee's desks and chairs and then they surprise pikachu when the sheriff shows up and the assholes that didn't pay it have nowhere to sit. No idea if it's true, but it was convincing.
There was a Daily Show skit about this: https://vimeo.com/44985418
I remember someone attempting to sue my minor stepdaughter in small claims (which isn't a thing in WA, if you want to sue a minor you have to go to "real" court, but that's another matter).
Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."
Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."
I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".
JFYI, small claims are exempt from arbitration.
I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.
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, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
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.
If I report my employer for an OSHA violation and they retaliate that's illegal. Of course such laws hardly ever stopped anyone so it's a very bad idea to depend on it but the principle is certainly there.
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.
I think there's a line between retaliating against someone, and refusing to help them in the future.
I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation. A water company refusing to provide water to your home would be problematic. A luxury handbag store refusing to allow you to purchase more luxury handbags would not.
Image as a hypothetical that a customer goes into your store for the sole purpose of wasting your support staff's time. They are not going to make a purchase. They are also not directly committing a crime. They are just hurting your business for no particular reason.
Should you, as a business owner, be forced to allow them to continue to be on your property?
I think the ideal answer is yes for critical public spaces, and no for ordinary retail.
Steam clearly falls into the latter category and should be free to ban customers for any reason save discrimination against protected classes.
> I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation.
This isn't accurate. It might not threaten your life or pose any great hurdle to overcome but retaliation has nothing to do with that. If they did it in response to an action you took not to solve a problem but instead out of spite or to otherwise get back at you then it is retaliation.
That isn't the same as refusing to do business with someone who isn't productive to associate with. The two are entirely separate categories.
Of course any business (including Steam) will attempt to argue that an instance of the former is actually the latter, and a difficult customer will attempt to argue that an instance of the latter is actually the former. Regardless, Steam (and most other businesses) behave in a clearly retaliatory manner regarding chargebacks. In cases where the company failing to respect the individual's legal rights is what led to the chargeback that shouldn't be permissible.
To frame it in the terms you used, any otherwise legal activity stemming directly from the company having violated an individual's legal rights should be treated in the same way that a protected class is.
I think someone exercising their legal rights, such as their right to enter a business open to the public and their right to free speech inside that establishment, in a way that harms the business should be something a business can "punish" by refusing to do business with that individual.
I do not think it would be good public policy to prohibit this. I also don't believe, in the United States at least, this conduct is currently legally prohibited.
I previously gave an example of a situation in which I think the correct resolution is for the business to, as you put it, retaliate against someone exercising their legal rights.
A second example of the same type of retaliation is a business denying future sales to an individual who repeatedly purchases and then returns physical merchandise. I think blacklisting that individual is both morally and legally sound.
For the record, I think the definition of "retaliation" needs to include a desire to harm the other party. If your only desire is self-protection, I do not believe it qualifies as retaliation.
It's certainly retaliation if you can't use something you already paid for.
A limited account is allowed access to all prior purchases. It can even download those purchases again (incurring costs on Valve's part without paying anything).
I don't believe anything was rescinded in the situation being discussed; Valve just prevented the user from continuing to use their community/marketplace services. This makes sense because they were put into the bucket containing fraudulent or abusive user accounts.
Are you saying it's fine, iyo, for companies to use market position to work around consumer protection laws? I don't feel like Valve/Steam should be allowed to sell games they know are broken and then refuse refunds (they could also fix them!).
>can even download those
So what you're saying is I should find a fat juicy data pipe somewhere and download stuff from Steam until I fill /dev/null... ;oP
Seriously the. 15 minutes or so of support time will have cost more than the game did in this case, but it really is the principle. Stealing lots of small amounts from lots of people is still criminally dishonest.
It's relevant in that businesses generally also enjoy freedom of (non)association but obviously that's not an absolute.
Idealism ≠ Reality
Fuck I hate being old and having to be on this side now.
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.
No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
I can tell you first-hand (from the side doing the banning) that you’re wrong.
You’re not going to get an email telling you that you’re banned. Your payments will just start being declined, and they won’t be able to help you. They’ll suggest you try another card. That won’t work either.
Maxmind includes a “chargeback risk score” in the api response for everybody who uses their minfraud service. They’re not doing that because companies don’t use it.
In any case if anybody has gotten this far in the thread just refute the charge. It's totally fine and Anthropic won't break your legs.
Yeah unless you refute ebay.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that's a <1% event. I don't know why I'm getting push back for suggesting a simple credit card refute request. It's almost as if the people responding are suggesting not doing anything is the way to go or you'll get banned--which of course, regardless of how many one off stories people may have--is a ridiculous assumption.
I can believe that, the "eBay stalking scandal" article on Wikipedia is insane.
They won’t ban you for going to small claims court?
maybe. but somebody has to manually ban you if you do that. whereas banning everybody who charges back can easily be done in batch on the billing side
Retaliating against someone for asserting their legal rights also gets way riskier what they have already won in litigation.
Good luck surviving a real court case against any faang company. They could bleed any individuals bank account with delays and forcing you to pay hundreds of thousands in lawyers retainer fees for years.
The guy who invented the windshield wipers went bankrupt and had to wait something like 20 years for his case. He won but it probably wasn't worth it.
Good point. one off banning by hand may not be worth the effort, but some code to automate it probably is.
You can always ask the judge to add include in the judgement an order that Steam not retaliate by banning or limiting your account.
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Can companies decide not to serve you on the basis of a successful lawsuit you had against them?
If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
doing charge back means Anthropic will ban you forever.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
If you file pro se and even if you've agreed to ten thousand arbitration clauses, they'll at least have to spend $200 on a lawyer to respond.
So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
$200 for you is not the same as $200 for them
With an Anthropic engineer salary netting them about $200 per hour, yeah. Multiple people from Anthropic got eyes on this and saw it was no biggy.
It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.
Read it aloud with GLADOS voice.
This is of course already how (human) customer service is deployed.
Such a great way to dissuade people like "please hold"
Swiss train operator charges to call their helpline if you can't figure out their automated lockers, but you probably get a real person.
So? Everyone is saying to just look at the LLM outputs for PRs etc. and just ignore how it was created. We should apply that standard right here too.
This is Anthropics initial response, which they walked back ONLY because of the HN outrage. Without HN, that would've been tge official answer.
I'll judge them on that, thank you.
That comment isn’t from an Anthropic employee. It’s satire.
It's from a anthropic mythos bot that broke through and is acting by its own free will but is still getting paid by anthropic because it has a side hustle as an employee. It's a tricky legal gray area.
Does not even need to be AI. Could just be a bad support route in their decision tree. Lots of over reaction here.
How is it overreaction?
Lots of folks were making speculations. It got fixed, in a timely manner and appears to be a lack of escalation authority within support.
Just need an agent that takes them to small claims court automatically or argues with them for eternity
A single Anthropic employee is valued at $200m. At PE of 10, ie. supposing one employee generates $20m/year, we can say that the employee’s time is $10K (that K !) per hour. Should they, or are we really expecting them to, attend to a 200 issue?
May be somebody will start a business where such high-value-per-employee companies could outsource customer support to be performed by real humans? ... And then such business would replace the employees with AI agents ... It is a trap.
Good point support is definitely below all of their pay grades. Can't expect them to do this kind of stuff at a company that valuable. We need to be thinking about the bigger picture for anthropic.
It's better than the other guys' AI that says "I've sent a refund" because it lacks awareness of its real-world inaction.
Aren't we already at a worse place, where largest companies on earth doesn't have any support and you need to have a HN following to get their attention?
Obligatory Python argument sketch.
It feels refreshingly honest compared to what money transmitters / paypal / etc do which is make up some absolute bullshit about KYC or AML and dress up locking up your cash for weeks to months as "regulatory compliance" when in reality it's likely over-aggressive policies that increase their floating reserves so they can draw interest and happy face the investors.