HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

Bug and Billing Behavior

• A Claude Code bug caused repositories containing the string HERMES.md in git history to be treated as “third‑party harness” usage and silently routed to extra usage billing instead of the included subscription quota.
• This was later described by Anthropic as an “overactive anti‑abuse system” related to detecting unapproved clients; they say it is now fixed and affected users will receive full refunds plus extra credits.
• Several commenters stress that the core issue is not the specific $200 overcharge but that such filename‑based billing logic existed at all, especially in billing code.

Refund Handling and Support Bot

• The original reporter shared a support response saying refunds could not be issued for “technical errors” causing incorrect billing, which many interpreted as official policy.
• It later emerged that this text was likely generated by Anthropic’s support LLM and pasted into GitHub, causing confusion about whether it was a real, standing policy.
• After backlash on Reddit, X, and HN, Anthropic staff publicly committed to refunds and credits for all affected.

Legal and Ethical Concerns

• Many argue that refusing to correct overbilling due to a known bug is illegal or fraudulent in many jurisdictions.
• Discussion covers small‑claims court, chargebacks, regulatory complaints, and the practical difficulty of enforcing judgments against large companies.
• Some note that an AI committing to investigate or refund could create legal reliance (e.g., promissory estoppel), raising novel liability questions.

Customer Service and AI-Driven Support

• Numerous anecdotes describe double charges, random invoices, lost credits, subscription glitches, and suspended accounts, often met only with circular or dead‑end AI support flows and no human escalation.
• Several participants generalize this to a broader trend: large tech firms using bots and opaque processes to discourage complaints and retain disputed funds.

Reputation, Trust, and Competition

• Many say Anthropic is rapidly burning goodwill: repeated outages, perceived model degradation, surprise billing, and weak support outweigh model quality.
• Comparisons are made to Google, Meta, PayPal, and others with poor support but dominant positions; some doubt Anthropic has the same moat.
• Users discuss moving to competitors (OpenAI Codex, Chinese models, cloud‑hosted open‑weights) or to local LLMs, and using virtual/prepaid cards to cap financial exposure.