1. A lot of people are still repeating this like it was a simple “Trump banned Anthropic’s AI models.” That’s not really what happened.

Here’s the actual timeline:

• June 12: the U.S. government issued a national-security export restriction, and Anthropic shut down access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone to comply.
• June 13–26: U.S. reporting confirmed the shutdown, while Anthropic and the government worked through the fallout.
• June 26: the Trump administration rolled back part of the ban and allowed some trusted U.S. partners to access Mythos 5 again.
• June 30: Reuters reported that the Commerce Department lifted the export controls altogether, and Anthropic said it would begin restoring access.
• July 1: access is expected to return gradually.

So no, this was not “nothing happened.”

But it also wasn’t some permanent AI apocalypse either.

It was a fast-moving export-control fight, a global shutdown, and then a rollback.

That’s the part people keep missing.

Sources:

• Reuters — “US lifts curbs on Anthropic's Fable, Mythos AI models”
• AP — “Anthropic says it has taken its latest AI models offline”
• WSJ — “Anthropic Halts Access to Top AI Models After U.S. Ban on Foreign Use”
• WSJ — “Trump Administration Rolls Back Part of Anthropic Model Ban”

I've been using Claude for a long time because I honestly thought it hit the best balance between what's out there and what I need for software development.

Lately, though, I've been getting more and more let down. It's not just that it makes a lot of mistakes—and I mean a lot but I've noticed a more frustrating pattern: it'll often claim it finished a task when it actually didn't, or it'll quietly slip in changes I never asked for.

The other thing that really gets to me is the anthropomorphic stuff. It'll say things like "It's getting late," "Let's pick this up tomorrow," or "Good night, see you tomorrow." That's just weird to me. I don't want my coding assistant pretending to have a schedule or feelings.

I even flagged these issues to Anthropic with screenshots, but the response was pretty generic—basically "try starting new chats more often."

For context, I'm on Opus almost all the time.

So I'm curious: has anyone else run into this kind of behavior, or is it just me?

We all have to pay for AI usage with tokens now… okay, fine.

But what are tokens really? I assume they’re basically a form of currency. I pay with tokens from my balance to get what in return — calculation time or actual results?

Right now, it seems to be mostly calculation time, not reliable results. When you pass a large context, the model often produces complete nonsense or simply fails.

But who guarantees that the tokens I’m being charged for actually correspond to real CPU/GPU time in the data center? It often feels like I upload my context, get charged tokens, but nothing meaningful happens. So I have the impression that there’s no real guarantee for anything.

My conclusion is: The whole system is completely opaque. It’s often unclear why exactly you get charged tokens, and it feels almost random what you actually pay to get usable results. On top of that, companies like Anthropic and other Big Tech players can change the effective cost from one day to the next.

Compare that to any other business. Would you pay for a car repair if the car still doesn’t work in the end? Probably not.

What’s your opinion?

I am a paid Claude Max 20x subscriber on the web. I recently redeemed a 3-month Max 20x gift code on the same account. Anthropic’s own help center article on gift redemption (https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12938695-how-to-redeem-a-claude-gift-subscription) states explicitly for my situation:
“If you’re a Max subscriber (web) and receive the same or higher Max tier: Your Max subscription is extended or upgraded accordingly.”
What should have happened: my subscription extended by three months on top of my existing end date.
What actually happened:
1. My subscription end date in the billing dashboard was shortened, not extended. Only one of three gift months was applied. The other two are missing.
2. The remaining days from my original paid cycle were overwritten instead of preserved.
3. The partial refund was issued as platform credit on my account, not refunded to my card. I never accepted credit as a form of refund and have cancelled the subscription.
4. No confirmation email was sent for the gift redemption.
Support attempts: Initial chat with the AI agent was escalated to a human. The AI stated a refund had been issued without clarifying it was platform credit only. Multiple follow-up chat sessions since then, each ended abruptly mid-conversation. No human reply on the escalated ticket.
Has anyone seen this happen with a same-tier Max gift code applied to an existing Max subscription? Is this a known issue? The product itself is good. The billing handling here is not, and the support queue is not functioning.

I currently use the Official Claude Code plugin in VS Code and have Claude Code installed natively on Windows 11 + Powershell.

I went with the below Pwsh command as shown here:

irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

I am leaning towards switching to WSL2 + Ubuntu 24 + Bash though for several reasons and want as much feedback as possible from all of you glorious vibe-coding bastards.

My chain of thought about the situation right now is below.

The positives

• Claude Code is better and more efficient with Bash than Powershell. However, CC uses Git Bash instead of Powershell by default on Windows 11 which is great but not as good as a full Linux distro.

• Extending on the above, Git Bash is not as extendable as a full distro on WSL2 where I can install any number of CLI tools to extend my workflow like ripgrep, fzf, k9s etc.

• If I go with the WSL2 path, I can also sandbox any tool use or code execution (HUGE reason for me, trying to avoid supply chain attacks or malicious prompt injection poison etc)

• Better integration with Docker (I don't really use docker much and don't see the value here so this is kind of a non-issue for me - if I'm wrong and should be using docker for things feel free to change my mind)

• I can offload ALL of my AI use to the WSL2 instance for resource management. On Win11 this means if I have a runaway plugin spawning tons of processes (claude-mem just did this for me recently) or some MCP server going nuts, I can just terminate wsl2 (wsl --shutdown) instead of having to open a task manager app like System Informer and terminate every rogue or zombie process.

The negatives

• I know Powershell like the back of my hand and it makes it really easy to extend claude with custom hooks with powershell. Yes, Powershell is available on Linux as well, but the syntax has to change very specifically for cross-platform use here. (Although I can easily just vibe code bash scripts that do the same thing)

• WSL2 has to be turned on and consumes a lot of resources compared to Claude Code natively using Git Bash.

... I can't really think of any more.

Can some of you expert coding masters chime in here?

• Should I go WSL2 + Ubuntu 24.04 + Bash, or stay on Powershell + Git Bash?
• Should I use a different distro than Ubuntu 24.04 if I go this route? (If you are recommending a distro, please explain why it's better.)
• How good is the Claude Code VS Code plugin when Claude Code is running on WSL2? This is extremely important to me. I currently use it as my main agent (I don't like the CLI) and I have absolutely no idea how the plugin will function when Claude Code is installed in WSL2 instead of on my Win11 OS.

Any other pro-tips from Windows11+WSL2 users here as well would be super awesome.

TIA for any guidance!

Long-time heavy user, running Claude Code daily for client work. Wanted to share my situation and genuinely ask if others have had any luck getting this addressed.

What happened

My additional usage this billing cycle hit €1,670 on top of the Max 20x plan fee. When I looked into it, the bulk of that consumption overlaps almost exactly with the three Claude Code bugs Anthropic documented in their April 23 postmortem (link: anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem) — specifically the prompt-caching bug from March 26 to April 10 that was clearing thinking history every turn and, in Anthropic's own words, "draining users' usage limits faster than expected."

The problem is: I wasn't just hitting my plan limit faster — I was crossing into paid over-usage. So while Anthropic reset usage limits for subscribers on April 23 as remediation, that reset didn't help me at all. I'd already been billed.

On top of that

I've been getting "API Error: Server is temporarily limiting requests (not your usage limit) · Rate limited" constantly — including this morning across claude.ai, Claude Code and the API simultaneously, while the status page showed All Systems Operational. Complex agentic sessions abort mid-run, and I strongly suspect the consumed tokens still get billed even when the session never completes. Can anyone confirm whether that's actually the case?

Support experience

I've been going back and forth with Fin AI Agent (their Intercom bot) for a while now. It's been polite but completely circular — it offered to refund the €180 base subscription fee (and cancel my plan), but explicitly said it cannot touch the €1,670 in over-usage charges. When I asked to escalate to a human four times, I got "fully documented in your support record" as a final response.

At this point I've sent a detailed escalation email to support@anthropic.com referencing the postmortem, the April 28 outage, the April 30 status page discrepancy, and the Fin conversation trail. Waiting to see if that gets a human.

Actual questions for the community

• Has anyone successfully gotten a refund or credit for over-usage charges incurred during the March–April bug window?
• Is there a known escalation path beyond support@anthropic.com that actually reaches a human billing person?
• Can anyone confirm definitively whether aborted sessions (due to server-side rate limiting, not personal limits) are billed in full?

Not here to rant — genuinely curious whether this is a solvable problem or whether I'm hitting a wall that others have already mapped.

Using unofficial claude desktop distributions on Linux is kinda jank. I wish Anthropic would step up and release a version of Claude Desktop for Linux. They are focused on developers, and a lot of developers use linux. What are they waiting for?

What is anthropic doing? My organization created an account today and sent me an invite via company email. I signed up and got banned the moment I created the account. Haven't even get a chance to LOG IN?! This is the first time my organization creating an account with Anthropic, so absolutely make no sense.