<p><pre><code> > Anthropic is an AI company that builds one of the most capable AI assistants in the world. Their support system is a Fin AI chatbot that can’t actually help you.
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This really cuts to the reality of AI hype: no, agents are not nearly as capable as OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. <i>need</i> you (or rather your C-suite, itching to fire you) to believe. They really, <i>really</i> need you to believe the hype. How can you tell? Cases like this and the fact that there are 5000 open bugs, constant regressions, ignored feature requests in the CC repo. The fact that Codex doesn't fully implement the simple and well-defined MCP spec for prompts. The fact that even CC has gaps with the MCP implementation...a spec that they created!<p>If the progenitors with functionally infinite tokens can't get this basic stuff right, everything else they are doing is just blowing smoke. I don't care if you can ship a kernel compiler or a janky browser; how about just make your software work?
TBF, I think Anthropic is a victim of their own success right now. We've had clients reach out to their <i>sales</i> team and be unable to reach anyone. I think they are just busier than they can actually handle.
I had the displeasure of interacting with that support agent earlier today and was very surprised. It's just as good as the one my ISP has.<p>We're meant to trust Anthropic enough to replace all of our engineers by their model for writing our software but somehow they don't trust it enough to let it handle simple customer support decisions. But shhhh, it's voluntarily nerfed just slightly bellow ASI for our safety.
I tried their Pro plan on March 1 and immediately noticed how bad their usage limits were, so I asked for a refund that same evening.<p>Their chatbot accepted the request, I was downgraded to the free plan immediately, and since then I have been waiting for the money.
Did you follow up? You might need to do it again before charge back.<p>Thankfully that's not Google, so your life is not going to be turned upside down because they don't give a f*.
Yikes. That's unacceptable. Crazy that it has been over a month and you still haven't gotten the refund.
Issue a chargeback.
It's important to remember that a chargeback should be considered the nuclear option, and, when using it, one should be comfortable with the possibility that one might never do business with this company again, since it could result in being blacklisted (even if one is, in fact, in the right). I'm not saying <i>not</i> to do it, but one should keep in mind the potential repercussions.
What exactly is being blacklisted in this case? They have a credit card and sort of an address. These aren’t exactly hard to “regenerate”.<p>The risk with something like a google account is more the amount of shit people have tied up in the account, that doesn’t sound like it would be the case here.<p>More generally in this age it seems like disputes (which don’t necessarily result in a true chargeback) are just more routine than nuclear in the US. I now do them routinely for certain restaurants with delivery and a customer service contact that is essentially a black hole (it’s usually a partial dispute). They’ve obviously figured whatever CB rate they’re getting is cheaper than CS.
If a business attempts to steal from me I instantly charge back and the onus is on them to prove that I owe them money. I do this all the time and have never been blacklisted.
waiting for month for a refund (and having lost access to the pro plan immediately but no immediate refund) is definite grounds for chargeback.<p>there is no human on the other end of the chain, and I bet that chargebacks are how they issue refunds (ie relying on the "nuclear" option as the standard practice of how refunds fundamentally works at their company.<p>ie "don't need to answer emails about refunds, because if they really wanted their money back, they'd issue a chargeback" as part of the regular procedure.<p>a lot of companies do this, and it's a common way of minimizing customer support budgets.
I always wondered about this. Do companies tie the credit card to an identity to block or do they just block the cc number?<p>If the latter, seems like a small friction point for a consumer. Given how often cc numbers change and how many an (American) consumer has, this won’t block anything unless you are charging back more than once every few months.
So the Anthropic company would blacklist you for taking your money back by force that they owe you?<p>Ok sounds like evil should be labeled and not tolerated as anything else.
Anthropic doesn't allow you to hide or unshare Projects which were shared by team members who are no longer on the team. Contacted them about this two months ago, have yet to hear from any human.
Have you tried suieng then in small claims court? They skimp in being a real company with real legal support by burning infestor capital, because staff attorney salaries are accounted for much harder than individualized lawsuits from practices not directly resolved next lay period.<p>Most people who commit wire fraud weren't socially bullied and criticized enough before their professional positions to keep in line legally. Useless failures.
This is the risk of being a consumer in the AI world - companies are running extremely lean on real humans and are deferring support to AI chatbots with no real reasoning abilities...<p>Also an issue with scale - for example, Google having similar issues of not handling small, isolated cases.<p>Hope you get your money back!
You can call Google and their support for business customers is personal and excellent.
Google is like this since ever, way before AI, so no, that's not the reason.
Thanks, I hope so too!
I had a similar thing happen where I was looking to recover funds from unexpected extra usage charges and got went through an identical experience.<p>I realize the company barely has time to cash checks, but failing to handle small fry reasonable charge disputes should be handled appropriately.
I don’t know why you waited so long to submit this to the support forum they actually read, which is of course this one.
I'm not surprised, I burn (on purpose) more than 15k$/month on Anthropic tokens and I've never been able to talk to any of their sales despite filling the contact form every week for the past 4 months :')
TBF I'd probably pay some solicitor $50 to have them send a nicely worded letter after 2 weeks.<p>You're too kind for the company trying to steal from you - whether intentionally or by negligence, doesn't really matter.<p>Or the small claims court mentioned by someone else. Make sure to add your time and the cost of the representation.
I did a chargeback against OpenAI for something similar and I showed my credit card company the logs with the support bot, as it was my only point of contact for the company.
This is what credit card chargebacks are for.
I didnt know that they have any useful support at all! :-D<p>I sent them some feedbacks one some issues, actually good ideas, and I didnt get any response so far.
Their response time is usually around a month IME, yes.
Ah, I wouldn't have written this blog post if I had known that that was the usual turnaround time. There should really be more transparency on when one should expect to hear back rather than the generic response of "a member of our team will be with you as soon as we can."<p>edit: albeit another commenter claims they have been waiting for 2 months...
Large corporations have been downsizing on QA and CS roles since before the LLM era. For many of those companies the lack of proper QA leads to more problems for users which compounds the lack of available CS staff. It's called either enshittification or maximizing shareholder value, can't remember which.
Thinking it might be time to push for some laws to mandate companies have better systems to handle and address concerns that impact customers businesses and livelihoods.<p>This inability to reach and/or get things resolved through customer support channels seems endemic, and probably generally part of the enshittification trend as a whole.
Fin is actually Intercom’s branded agent, so if Anthropic is using their own model for support at all isn’t clear.
I was curious so I looked into it. Seems like my issues were encountered when Fin AI was running on Sonnet 4.0, though Fin AI's new model (Fin Apex 1.0) was rolled out ~2 weeks ago. <a href="https://www.intercom.com/blog/announcing-fin-apex-the-age-of-vertical-models-is-here/" rel="nofollow">https://www.intercom.com/blog/announcing-fin-apex-the-age-of...</a>
"Okay, Claude, and this time we're going to slice the salami <i>really</i> thin, because this sandwich is for all the marbles..."
if this is on a credit card you can get the money back from the credit card company for "undelivered goods"
This sucks but is not surprising at all. Anthropic has more demand than it could ever fulfill, and looking into support tickets asking for refunds is never going to get anyone’s attention. If you actually want the money back, assuming you live in the US, this is what small-claims court is for.
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