It's quite light on specifics. It should have been straightforward for the author to excerpt some of the prompts he was submitting, to show how innocent they are.
For all I know, the author was asking Claude for instructions on extremely sketchy activity. We only have his word that he was being honest and innocent.
If you read to the end of the article, he links the committed file that generates the CLAUDE.md in question.
Maybe the problem was using automation without the API? You can do that freely with local software using software to click buttons and it's completely fine, but with a SAAS, they let you then ban you.
(My bet is that Anthropic's automated systems erred, but the author's flamboyant manner of writing (particularly the way he keeps making a big deal out of an error message calling him an organization, turning it into a recurring bit where he calls himself that) did raise my eyebrow. It reminded me of the faux outrage some people sometimes use to distract people from something else.)
He says himself that this is a guess and provides the "missing" information if you are actually interested in it.
I am not saying that the author was in the wrong and deserved to be banned. I'm saying that neither I nor you can know for sure.
Because if you don't believe that boy, do I have some stories for you.
It is when the other side refuses to tell their side of the story. Compare it to a courtroom trial. If you sue someone, and they don't show up and tell their side of the story, the judge is going to accept your side pretty much as you tell it.
Not just third parties, but also the first party can't be sure of anything - just as he said. This entire article was speculation because there was no other way to figure out what could've caused the ban.
> where one party shares only the information they wish and the other side stays silent as a matter of default corporate policy.
I don't think that's a fair viewpoint - because it implies that relevant information was omitted on purpose.
From my own experience with anthropic, I believe his story is likely true.
I mean they were terminating sessions left an right all summer/fall because of "violations"... Like literally writing "hello" in a clean project and first prompt and getting the session terminated.
This has since been mostly resolved, but I bet there are still edge cases on their janky "safety" measures. And looking at the linked claude.md, his theory checks out to me. I mean he was essentially doing what was banned in the TOS - iteratively finding ways to lead the model to doing something else them what it initially was going to do.
If his end goal was to write a malware which does, essentially, prompt injection... He'd go at it exactly like this. Hence sure as hell can imagine anthropic writing a prompt to analyze sessions determining bad actors which caught him