None-US Claude users: beware if used Fable – account suspension experience

9 points by Amir6 13 days ago | 4 comments

On Wednesday June 17 I woke up at 6:48 AM (Eastern) local time to an email from Anthropic with the subject: “Your account has been suspended.” It basically says an internal investigation of “suspicious signals” indicates I may be in violation of a supported country policy, and that they revoked my access to Claude. It was followed by two more emails at the exact same time, stating the same thing.

I was refunded too: two refunds (one for credits, one for my monthly membership).

For context, I’ve been a Claude member for more than two years, and I’ve been on top-tier plans since near the beginning. My use case is mostly business brainstorming, research (business + personal context), and a little coding. So losing access basically stops meaningful work.

I appealed immediately. The appeal flow has one “nice surprise”: it allows you to export your data. The drawback: the export link returned a tiny ~235 byte JSON file with basically account metadata (my name, phone, timezone, role, etc.). It did not give me the conversation history I expected. I backed up my important chats manually, because if it’s on someone else’s system, it’s not mine.

Here’s the part that’s hardest: there is zero explanation about which date/conversation/topic caused the flag, and by their own timeline it takes ~10 business days to review. Also, after suspension, the data export didn’t work properly (it returns almost nothing), and I tried multiple times.

My best (and only plausible) explanation, based on my timeline: I used Fable for a couple hours after it appeared, and then stopped. Fable was later banned for users outside the US, and that’s the only thing that lines up with the “supported country policy” language.

As of now, my appeal is still pending. I’ll update this post as things progress. If anyone from Anthropic wants to reach out, contact info is in my bio.

Takeaways:

Have backup plans (seriously). If you’re outside the US, be careful that using the top tier models may trigger country-policy flags. Expect unclear/non-specific explanations. Manually back up anything important.

Candid feedback to Anthropic:

- Please provide at least which category/date triggered the decision.

- Please ensure the data export meaningfully includes what users need for continuity.

- The current process turns a “safety flag” into major business downtime without clarity. If anyone’s seen similar behavior, feel free to share what you experienced.

RecycledEle 9 days ago |

It should be mandatory that any account suspension tell you exactly what you did, quote your actions exactly, and quote that exact part of the policy exactly.

This is a chance for the EU to actually do something, if they are listening.

Amir6 9 days ago | |

Well said. Especially as having access to frontier models become so essential to work (and even some aspects of daily life!).

teknopaul 9 days ago |

IMHO that Fable ban is because Grok is now too big to fail and quite far behind so the highly corrupt US govt is banning competition from getting too far ahead of Grok. No seen any idication that it is anything else.

That will likely result in other competition abroad catching up, it usually does.

Amir6 5 days ago | |

Fair point, but banning someone without explaining why — especially on a tool essential to professionals — is indefensible. The broken appeal process just makes it worse.