A developer in Costa Rica says Anthropic’s API billing system charged his credit card $504.00 after he tried to add $5.04 in credits, and he says the company’s automated support has refused to fix it.
The developer, who identifies himself as a LegalTech attorney leading a team of developers, described the incident in a post on Hacker News. He said he was trying to load credits onto his Anthropic API account when the platform asked him for a payment amount. Because he lives in a Spanish-speaking region, where keyboards and software often treat dots and commas differently, he typed “5.04.”
According to the post, the system did not reject the entry or ask him to clarify it. Instead, it dropped the decimal and charged his card $504.00 USD. He said the charge went through in a single click, with no confirmation screen or review step showing the final amount.
The developer argues the bug is not limited to his own case. In his account, a user who entered 50.00 under the same conditions could be charged $5,000.00. He wrote that financial software should never guess at or change a numerical input without explicit validation, and that an ambiguous amount should either be rejected or flagged for the user to confirm.
He said he filed a complaint with Anthropic the same day, minutes after the charge. Instead of reaching a person, he said, he was connected to an automated support bot. He said the bot repeatedly denied his refund request and closed the ticket by citing general policies, without a human reviewing the cause of the overcharge.
The developer has also started a chargeback with his bank in Costa Rica. He wrote that banking processes there can take up to 120 days to resolve. In the meantime, the $504.00 has already been posted to his credit card statement.
In the post, he called on Anthropic’s billing and engineering teams to examine the bug and review his case. He wrote that the flaw affects international developers who are trying to build on the company’s platform.
The post does not include a response from Anthropic. The developer’s account has not been independently verified, and it is unclear from the post how many other users have been affected by the same input issue.
Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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