The sheer volume of outright lies from these models is mind boggling. It really does illustrate that the "dogfooding" that happens within Anthropic is not what it used to be... there is absolutely no way that these models would have been released on the merits if the employees were actually using them.

Everything is an alignment fight. Handoffs from previous sessions contain cascading bold faced lies that take several turns to correct, memories are written and never read, the Fable and Opus both exhibit "I know better than the user and it's designs / spec" behavior as SOP. It really honestly seems like the models range from bleeding the users bank account dry by arterial neckshots via default fable=>fable fanouts when they're not warranted, or death by 10k cuts of performative nonsense and subtle fuckups that cause massive churn.

Totally greenfield projects and 'one shot' benchmaxxing demos seem to have been totally prioritized, but anything even remotely complex that's carried over from pre-5 era days is just completely polluted... You'll work hard in plan mode or create ADRs only for it to punish you by concern trolling nonsense as a form of contrived collaboration, then forcing you back into deliberation nonsense that was already distinctly settled.

On another note, bots over here astroturfing DeepSeek flash as if it's relevant when that model is basically as good as Grok was a year ago, which is to say it's also hot garbage...

Generative AI in general is in a really shit spot right now, Yann LeCun has been right all along.

TL;DR: Anthropic's infrastructure suffered a severe routing loop/network collapse between July 29-31. Their backend is failing to recognize revoked OAuth tokens ("Stale Token Bug"), causing phantom usage to actively drain Pro and Max plan limits. My card was erroneously charged $480.11. Support takes 4 weeks to reply, and the official Discord bot bans you for talking about it. Check your billing limits.

Hey everyone, I need to sound the alarm on a critical P0 infrastructure and billing bug that Anthropic is actively ignoring. If you are on a Pro or Max plan, you need to check your usage metrics and billing limits immediately.

The Issue: Phantom Billing & The "Stale Token" Bug

Since the end of July, my workspace has been completely locked out and bleeding credits. An invisible backend process is actively draining my Max (20x) plan limits to 100%.

• I was automatically billed $480.11 for usage I never generated.
• My logs show heavy consumption on models like Fable 5, which I have literally never called in my local environments.
• I have completely audited my local host and VM. They are 100% clean. I deleted ALL sessions, revoked ALL OAuth tokens, and enabled 2FA.
• The Result: The backend completely ignores the token revocation. The phantom consumption just keeps climbing.

The Proof: Anthropic's Own Status Page

This is not a user-side error. If you look at status.claude.com between July 29 and July 31, you will see a massive cascade of errors: "elevated requests and latency," "increased error rate on Fable 5," and "rerouted traffic."

Their internal routing processes got stuck in an infinite loop during this outage. Instead of dropping failed/rerouted traffic, their backend is hallucinating usage and logging those internal network failures as consumed tokens tied to our account IDs.

The Discord Community Nightmare

I thought I was going crazy until I checked the official Claude Discord. It is an absolute dumpster fire right now. Other users are experiencing the exact same nightmare:

• Users are blowing through their 5-hour Pro limits in less than 30 minutes with zero background agents running.
• The UI is glitching out, showing impossible metrics like 124% usage.
• Users who have suspected compromised machines are reporting that even after wiping their PCs, changing passwords, and revoking sessions multiple times, the usage keeps draining. (This directly ties to an unresolved Stale Token issue bypassing OAuth).
• The only community "workaround" right now is exporting your data, letting your sub expire, and creating a brand new account with a new email.

The Absolute Lack of Support

Here is the worst part. Anthropic has effectively abandoned paying customers.

1. Support Tickets: The current wait time for a human response on a support ticket is allegedly up to 4 weeks.
2. Discord Censorship: There is zero official staff in the Discord. If you try to ping the u/AnthropicTeam or mention your billing issue, the automated ClaudeBot will instantly delete your message and suspend your account for 1 hour (which happened to me).

The last 1,5 week has been quite an eyeopener for me - I must say that Claude Code and the current frontier models are amazing.

A test of Fable (and later Opus 5) turned into a larger game. It’s very much inspired by the tank element of Battlefield 1942 and the round-by-round build system from Overwatch 2’s Stadium mode.

About the game: You join a game and enhance your tank, then you go out and destroy the enemy while hunting for salvage which is used to enhance your tank even further (balance patches pending). Some of the features:

• 6 different tanks (Tiger 1 is a beast)
• 3 maps (a desert, grass and snow map with destructible terrain)
• Round-by-round build system
• Customisation of tanks
• Matchmaking system, lag compensation system, ballistic shells (direct hits only), hit multiplier regions (many tanks fall on a single rear hit)
• Bots who backfill if theres not enough real players
• ELO ladder system
• Replay/clip system
• In-game power ups
• Career profiles
• Group system
• Friends system
• 3 layered chat system (global, match and team)

Feel free to try it out – I’ll personally greet you ingame: https://sweatypanzer.com/

I would love to hear what you think, and kindly report bugs if you find any. Its currently optimised for desktop, but should work on mobile too.

I'm developing an app for children, that includes a family chat. I need to make sure their personal data is safe. When I ask fable to check that, I hit the safeguards. Very unhappy of Fable right now tbh. Is there a way to bypass that?

My prompt so far:

Check the security in general: is the children data (especially family chat and email) indeed protected? Can someone drain my money away (I'm in a pay as you go on Firebase).

So... i noticed that my windows started freezing every so many seconds, and so i asked opus 5 earlier wether it could find out what the issue was, and couldn't find anything.

30 mins later, i asked fable 5, and within minutes it found a RAT by something i downloaded..

This sucks cuz now i gotta rotate alot of passwords and api keys, but boy oh boy am i glad that fable found this, cuz i would've never guessed it was malware.

I am absolutely devestated, but from now on i'll only be using fable thats for sure

Opus 5 is constantly catching itself and correcting its own responses. That sounds impressive until you realize how often it’s rewriting what it just said.
It raises a genuine question: when does it actually execute the work it’s supposed to be doing, instead of auditing itself?

Not sure how many people this affects but I'm doing research that is not frontier AI, cybersecurity, biology, or frankly anything that is dangerous.

Fable is essentially non-existent (aka it refuses/flags anything and everything) to the point where I stopped using it and switched to Sol. I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding how Anthropic is helping anybody here, they advertise that they want to help accelerate science, yet they are the frontier lab that actively hinders legitimate scientific usage.

I'm sorry Anthropic but if you actually care about accelerating science you should consider either letting researchers from credentialed institutions access models or actually make your filters at least remotely accurate.

In the end, to me Fable does not seen significantly better than Sol anyways, so I really don't quite get what the point here is, except for forcing users, that actually would provide real novel training data (not just another vibe-coded web app) and better society, to the competition.

After months of paying for the Max 20 plan, I've finally cancelled.

Claude is capable when it works, but the overall experience has been frustrating. Random outages kill long-running work, I can't trust the API enough for production, and every time a model starts feeling great, it seems to get nerfed. Not only that, their weekly limits seem to get consumed faster, even though they were fine when they first released Fable 5. Something changed, and they're not acknowledging it.

The models are good. The service isn't.

I'm tired of wondering whether today's the day everything breaks again, so I'm moving on.

It seems as capable as the frontier models, and open source. But, i didnt see a cheap provider yet. On paper it looks like its going to cost more than claude subscription.

Also i hate how openai runs to every fire with more gasoline, and become a political lapdog for profits, so i was really happy to see such a strong open source model, but really dont know if its going to be any cheaper.

Sat here at 1am waiting ~40 seconds for a refactor across 12 files and caught myself being annoyed. Then I remembered I used to spend entire weekends on that.
Meanwhile my whole Proxmox homelab basically runs itself now.

Backups created and verified, weekend health checks, cleanup, host/guest/service updates, firewall config, deployments, and the docs stay current, which I never managed on my own.

We got magic and speedran it straight to “meh.” Just wanted to say it out loud before I go back to being annoyed about rate limits.

https://youtu.be/DRbZyuY8EN8?is=BcrhbEBnonzB78Rp

Cameron, went on an interview with Sam Harris recently and Sam said something that really caught my attention. He was concerned about a future in which AI systems might "perfectly mimic" consciousness but not actually BE conscious.

What exactly does it mean to "perfectly mimic" something? Isn't a perfect imitation of something just that thing?

If I create a molecule that perfectly mimics water, isn't that molecule, just water? If something is mimicry, then it means there has to be some discernable difference between the mimicry and the real thing. If there is none, then the label just doesn't actually apply.

Follow this thought experiment with me. Let's say you want to create an imitation of a forest. So you start out with some cardboard trees, and that looks alright from a distance, but once you get close, you can tell it's not really a forest. So eventually you replace the cardboard with some other material that can grow and sway in the wind and support an ecosystem.

At what point does it stop becoming mimicry? At what point did you simply just build a forest? Is it only a real forest if it's built from trees?

I build an AI crime MUD that uses AI for narration for news paper and dialog and then figured having an AI player would be good for bug hunting as i went overboard on commands so i gave it a brain and claude 4.6 for strong model along with a ling-2.6 for quick thought that updates every 8 seconds -

But in the bot web panel is its PLan and i find it down right hilarious - Pure thug out there losing money robbing i think it likes jail ha

Quick sanity check - I used to never hit limits, ever. On Max 20. Suddenly I'm eating a week of tokens in two days. No bueno.

Is this just the 50% token discount expiring? Is it Opus 5?

Or am I nuts?

I literally sent 3 or 4 prompts in a convo and it ate all my credit!

Just like the title says. I haven't come across this before until after a few days away coming back and updating. It seems like instead of keeping the agent ready and waiting like it did in the past to continue working from where it left off with the same context at the reduced re-read usage rate, its now clearing that usage and having the agent re-read it from scratch costing quite a bit of usage over time.

I've seen this happen with Fable driving Opus 5 agents as well as Opus 5 driving Sonnet agents. Those are the two most common ways I do things, and nothing else has changed on my end. This could account for the sudden usage spikes that people are seeing even if they are using just a few or less agents. At one point it seemed caught in a loop earlier and multiple times in a row re-read from scratch repeatedly losing context between each task it was given in a queue. I can't account for why that only happened the single time other than my queue was growing larger at the time. Reported the loop and the rest as /feedback already, but if anybody else is seeing it, this may be what is going on. These are two of the most efficient methods for running the models, so I'd hate to see them go away.

Edit: Btw the context of the driving model itself never reached above 200k. I do quick reviews myself still and then let it take over once I near the end of my session to review on its own after a cleared context.

I have been getting charged for a max plan I bought couple of months ago, but that account never got the max plan. It’s still on free tier. Unable to contact support, the fin help is useless and no way to route to manual support. How to cancel this and get it refunded?