Claude is now available in Europe

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Web crawling and bot behavior

  • Some report Claude’s crawler as among the most aggressive on their servers; one mentions 60 URLs/s across ~100M pages, more than they see from Googlebot.
  • Others argue this rate is actually low relative to total pages and not close to a DDoS.
  • Several compare Claude’s bot with Google, Bing, Semrush, etc.; Google is noted as far more frequent but also as a source of traffic, whereas Claude is seen as “only taking.”
  • Complaints also arise about other bots (e.g., Semrush) ignoring robots.txt and being more abusive than Claude.

Account bans, trust & safety, and “censorship”

  • A user reports being permanently banned after asking for a translation of Japanese text on a kitchen knife and getting no reply from support.
  • Others describe similar inexplicable bans that were later reversed.
  • This triggers a broad debate about trust & safety teams, perceived overreach, and whether corporate moderation is “censorship,” “fascism,” or necessary risk management.
  • There is extended discussion about culture-war issues (DEI, political correctness), free speech, and whether LLM safety policies suppress diversity of viewpoints.

Voice interaction and UX

  • Some see GPT’s two-way voice interface as a “killer feature,” hoping Claude will at least offer good speech-to-text.
  • Others find conversational voice unnatural, time-pressuring, and even unsettling, but acknowledge its accessibility potential.

Model quality and coding performance

  • Multiple commenters say Claude outperforms GPT-4/4o for their software development tasks, especially complex refactoring and working through obfuscated JavaScript.
  • A cited leaderboard suggests Claude leads GPT-4o on harder refactoring tasks, but a subthread questions how much benchmarks are distorted by training data leakage and overfitting.

Access, geography, and sign-up friction

  • Several Europeans report having used Claude earlier despite official non-availability; one notes occasional “not available in Europe” popups that didn’t block use.
  • Clarification that the launch is specifically for the EU; the UK already had access.
  • A UK user reports SMS verification failures.
  • Some dislike that Claude.ai requires accounts and mobile numbers, viewing this as user-hostile and steering them toward open models. Workarounds like cheap prepaid SIMs are mentioned.
  • Confusion over Anthropic’s statement that the API is “not intended for individual use” leads some to stick with OpenAI or open-source APIs.
  • Commenters from Canada note Claude still isn’t available there and question why it’s accessible in the EU but not Canada.