Oh no! How did this happen? ...I mean, how exactly did this happen? Is there a tutorial on how other engineers at other companies can replicate this?
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2026
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Just so they can avoid the same mistakes of course. Engineers hate mistakes.
Now this company can see which employee can actually still program, and which is just a "AI Prompt Engineer".
That's what happens when you are renting your very skills from a company. You'll hone nothing and you'll be happy.
but but ai better, ai future, we pay moni to all companiea Nd buy ai or we will be left without any growth - pleaz buy all ai- ai goof for making woled better place because it makes billionaires richer and they will definitely use that fo donate for charity
( blinking twice Elon musk and Mark Zuckerberg told me to say that, I'm being held at gunpoint)
Good twist on that one.
This is the nightmare scenario for any team that built their whole workflow around a cloud API. No warning, no clear reason, no real support path. just a Google form and 60 people sitting on their hands.
The uncomfortable truth is that "terms of service" at this scale is just "we can pull the rug whenever." Anthropic isn't unique here either. OpenAI, Google, all of them have the same opaque enforcement problem. It's a big part of why I've been building tools that run on local inference by default. Not because cloud is bad, but because your users shouldn't be one vague policy complaint away from a complete outage.
Local gives you continuity even when the upstream disappears.
Aaaaaand example #99999... Of why tech sovereignty is so important. The moment you start outsourcing your control, you become vulnerable to this exact kind of action by a company.
Everybody got sucked into the cloud "magic" for years, but now we are seeing the monster emerge more and more as proprietary technology enshitifies.
Luckily, there is a boom happening across the FOSS world, more and more people are finally waking up to the principles of software freedom and actual ownership.
May it continue to grow, as the corpos struggle and wither.
I was working as a sadmin (like a sysadmin but more alcoholism) when the ~cloud~ butt became all the rage.
Suddenly nobody wanted to host services on the hypervisor down the road, administered by someone you could ~throttle~ call in a crisis. Nobody wanted to hire a monkey to keep their local tubes clean and run the basic stuff they needed.
Everyone could tell you that once they had your overbuilt shit locked in to their very specific apis and services they had you by the short and curlies and by god were they gonna squeeze for all you were worth.
Alas, nobody cared because initial offerings were cheap and your stupid magento storefront had to be webscale.
Now 6 companies control the internet and everything else is going that way too.
Everyone could tell you that once they had your overbuilt shit locked in to their very specific apis and services they had you by the short and curlies and by god were they gonna squeeze for all you were worth.
On-prem solutions don't necessarily protect companies from this either though. Anyone staring down the barrel of a Broadcom renewal for on-prem VMware licenses knows this pain.
Broadcom's screwing over of VMware has been the biggest accelerator of migration into the cloud in the last 5 years.
There are FOSS hypervisors that are more than adequate for almost everyone's useage. I would not advise anyone to make any single company a critical part of their infrastructure unless you are tightly integrated in a mutually beneficial arrangement.
If you have your own sysadmin then you don't tend to get as fucked, alternatively migrating hypervisor software is a fuckload easier than migrating from a cloud service provider.
There are FOSS hypervisors that are more than adequate for almost everyone’s useage.
While I wish that were true I didn't find that to be the case.
For home use? Aboslutely. For Small businesses, probably, but labor costs rise noticeably in maintaining those alternate FOSS hypervisors. That can be a dealbreaker for lots of companies which swings the pendulum back to cloud (or Microsoft on-prem hypervisor).
When the Broadcom/VMware apocalypse occurred I looked at all other hypervisor options both FOSS and commercial and found none that were close to VMware's feature offerings for large enterprises. The best for most orgs would be HyperV only because of existing MS licensing the orgs had would cover most of the new license burden.
We used to use KVM and qemu. There was no serious overhead maintaining them.
How many VMs were you running? How many regions and what level of geographic redundancy were you offering your org? Were you serving any type of organization that had regulatory compliance/audit requirements (FDA, HIPAA, PCI, DoD, SOX, etc)?
Idk thousands? we were a hosting provider lol. Don't want to dox myself. Not sure how regions come into it, I mean if you can write shell and some orchistration language you're golden for anything.
We had some PCI stuff, I relapsed smoking because of getting through it haha. We were also halfway through getting the Australian government PII/gov contract thing when I left.
Most people suck at passing audit compliance because they try to box tick rather than explain how their tailored systems meet and exceed the requirements.
I mean if you can write shell and some orchistration language you’re golden for anything.
This is part of what I meant by labor costs increasing with alternate solutions. As I'm sure you're aware lots of folks in our field cannot write shell script to save their lives. You're a higher skill engineer than many orgs that were running VMware. This isn't a knock on VMware folks. PowerCLI can do lots of things especially in the hands of a skilled engineer, but a good number of folks never make it out of the vSphere client to do their work and complete their tasks. These folks are cheaper to employ because they can still accomplish the task by using the VMware tools that would otherwise require a bespoke solution written by the engineer.
We had some PCI stuff, I relapsed smoking because of getting through it haha. We were also halfway through getting the Australian government PII/gov contract thing when I left.
I hear ya! It can be pretty brutal, especially if you have an honest and knowledgeable QSA.
Most people suck at passing audit compliance because they try to box tick rather than explain how their tailored systems meet and exceed the requirements.
There are also those orgs that shop for a weak QSA, and pay the price later if the resulting audit is too weak. I agree with you that chasing a checked box isn't the best approach especially if you've got a good solution and can document compensating controls.
As I’m sure you’re aware lots of folks in our field cannot write shell script to save their lives.
Basic scripting was a requirement for being a sysadmin. If you can't script you can't sysadmin, you can maybe be the IT person but idk it's a skill that takes a year to learn well. Shell is a very restricted language. This was 15 years ago, maybe things have changed. I know some people run around with microsoft certs and cisco certs pretending they are qualified to do more than resell (for free lol) products but companies shouldn't hire those people.
At least when I worked in the field a basically competant linux sysadmin got paid around 40k usd a year. It was not highly paid work, almost every dork and any programmer who was willing to sit and read "the art and practice of system administration" could do it. You need one whizz on your team and a few technicians to carry out their vision.
I was not a programmer or engineer, just a sysadmin.
Many commenters were quick to point out that he should never have coupled his company so closely with Claude to begin with, a reasonable critique by itself. However, it's worth noting that the story could have easily been the same if it had instead been Amazon Web Services, Azure, or an authentication provider like Okta.
You are so close, you almost got it!
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60 employees who can’t be productive without AI?
And this is progress?
Your point is well-taken, but this is also exactly why AI reliance is dangerous. Anyone who sees this should realize the precarity of relying on products that can just be locked away from you.
Windows 11, Onedrive, Intel Management Engine, Google accounts, ...
France's government is actively leaving Windows for Linux as you read this. I'm about to follow suit, too.
Like Gmail? Google drive? Slack?
I'm not defending AI, but I can come up with >10 products that would absolutely cripple the company I work at if the provider suddenly says "Soz, terms of service violation".
Vendor reliance is dangerous. That doesn't just apply to AI. If the company in OP's message had both Claude and Gemini they'd been okay, so the problem isn't with AI explicitly - the problem is with reliance on services that are critical for workflows, and providers being able to change their mind at a moment's notice.
In any case, leaving aside where the problem is, the idea that 60 employees can't use Natural Intelligence to do their jobs means there's something really wrong with that company...
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My company is pivoting hard to Claude for everything, and besides the fact that it's irritating as fuck to use, it has me worried about shenanigans like in this article. For almost 50 years, they've had a "no reliance upon 3rd party platforms for core functions," but since they hired an AI apologist to the C-suite, all that has gone out the window in a matter of months.
Got me thinking I should warm up my resume...
Got me thinking I should warm up my resume...
Don’t wait, start now. The job market is a nightmare and finding one that isn’t being consumed by incompetent C-level AI FOMO is getting harder every day. I work on life-saving medical equipment and AI is being pushed on us for things that could literally kill people if not done correctly. Why would anyone spend 30 minutes using AI and risking people’s lives when I can just write it myself in 5 or 10? Madness. Complete, society-scale madness. The people pushing AI have no fucking idea what they are doing or how engineering works. People are going to die.
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Just continue coding using the natural neural networks in the brains of those 60 employees until the problem has been resolved and/or another AI provider selected. It's not like Claude invented coding. Sure, it's a pretty useful tool. But it is possible to research obscure APIs and develop software manually.
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https://bannedbyanthropic.com/
I believe the word is capricious. Everything cloud based is at the whim of someone else.
There are ways to mitigate against that, but ultimately if it's not yours...it's not yours.
Just another form of vendor lock-in. If your business model is mostly/entirely dependent on an external party, that should be a well understood risk.
The only people winning are selling shovels
Dude, it's 2026. We don't sell shovels, we sell shovel subscriptions.
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I am responsible for gathering information on AI to determine whether we should use it for our next project. The ask was to use it for a critical process task. Immediately in my head I was like "no, we are not using AI at all", but I obviously need quantifiable data. This is just another thing to add to my list of why using AI for core processes is one of the stupidest things you could ever do.
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Or... taps mic... don't fucking rely on AI for your business! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
We're in a period where the tools, agentic systems in this case, are gated by large companies.
This is like if IBM or Cray in the 60s through 90s only allowed rental of mainframes that they owned, and they can cut you off.
That wasn't the case then, but just like Google shutting down the father's entire Google account cause the pediatric doctor wanted a photo of the kid who had a rash to see if they needed to be brought into the ER or a cream, then got his phone (Google Fi), email (Gmail), and all his paperwork backups (drive) cut off... When you don't own the infrastructure you live at the whims of things you can not even appeal to.
This is a story about people and companies putting their entire business workflows in the hands of big tech who really don't care about anyone.
So, AI drama aside, the moment your life or business is fully dependent on an unreliable partner, this is what happens.
This has nothing to do with AI.
Don't rely on software or workflows or really anything that you can't easily switch if said company decides to stop doing business with you.
If you do, it better be a strategic partnership where something like this can't happen.
In this case, their workflows should have been AI provider agnostic or had a way to continue functioning if Claude went down.
This definitely has to do with AI. Because CEOs are losing their stupid minds over it. I agree with you in principle, but let's not lose sight of the fact that this specific technology is what CEOs are drooling over. Even in my company I had to tell the owner/CEO, "What problem are you trying to solve with AI?" His response was his mouth being open with a dumb look on his face.
So no business should rely on AI (or, to your point, any software) that it becomes detrimental to their business or workforce should that access be revoked.
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This is true for any company using 3rd party services. I worked for one that used a 3rd party messaging service to send out mfa texts to users. The company was hacked and went offline, so we couldnt send any mfa codes.... and of course, they had no plan b.
In business, always have a backup
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You're going to see a lot more of this and other forms of fuckery as the VC money dries up.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/four-horsemen-of-the-aipocalypse/
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60 employees were dead in the water, as reportedly their daily workflows rely on the AI assistant's
Is that a joke? 60 employees do not know how to do their job? This is not Anthropic's problem.
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Ironically, this is a great case study to illustrate the value of Chinese models. They've released a number that are on par with Claude's latest models under "open weight" licenses that would allow you to run them yourselves if you wanted to, or to hire some other third party to provide API access. It wouldn't matter what the original company's "usage policy" is in that case.
There are a couple of Western open models that aren't bad either, but they tend to be aimed at a smaller and simpler use case than Claude.
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Either they didn't pay, they found an exploit, or, more likely, someone at Claude was reviewing their conversations. Take note, any business that cares about IP or confidentiality.
I'll bring two theories to the table.
a) they got caught distilling for their own models b) they re-sold their $200/mo plans as APIs
Oh my God, my Eliza 2.0 chatbot is blocked. I'm experiencing withdrawals already, my productivity is down 76.8%.
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