What Happened to the User
The post's course is typical: something went wrong with the account, affecting normal use, a ticket was submitted, an automated reply came back, and then a long silence—following up, following up again, and after more than a month, not a single real person appeared. The comments quickly turned into a claiming session for similar ordeals—billing disputes, wrongful-ban appeals, enterprise procurement inquiries—every channel ending at the same wall of automated replies. The repeatedly cited irony: a company that sells "conversational intelligence" as its product has no conversation between itself and its customers.
A Sample of an Industry-Wide Ailment
To be fair, this isn't unique to Anthropic—OpenAI's and Google's consumer AI services are equally known for missing support. The structural cause is growth-first: user numbers grow exponentially while support headcount is staffed linearly, and the gap can only be patched with automation, which happens to be unable to handle exceptions like appeals that require authorization and judgment. Understanding it is one thing, but the consequences are still borne by the vendor—consumers' trust and enterprise customers' procurement evaluations will both record "no one to reach when things go wrong" as a major deduction. For these companies selling trust, support isn't a cost that can be cut—it's part of the product.
via: Hacker News