Anthropic suspended Grant de Swardt’s paid Claude Max 20x account after he noticed unusual token consumption. He had not used the AI tool that day, yet his token usage climbed.
"In the clearest controlled interval, it increased from 45% to 55% while I performed no work, scheduled Cowork tasks were paused or completed, Dispatch/cloud execution was disabled, and there was no corresponding active local Claude Code task," de Swardt told TechCrunch.
He contacted Anthropic, which agreed something was off and suspended his account, invalidating all his sessions and server-side tokens.
Anthropic issued de Swardt a partial refund of £44.49 for the remaining time on his $200-per-month subscription. The suspension disrupted his business, which relies on AI agents for tasks like data loading and website design.
"Like everything is just running through AI these days," he said. After investigation, Anthropic identified a compromised Claude session key used to mint unauthorized OAuth tokens.
The company told de Swardt the account "appeared to have been used by an unauthorized-looking third-party service to handle activity for other people, but they could not determine how it obtained access." In other words, a hacker accessed his account and siphoned off tokens covertly.
Because account support tracks total usage but not itemized usage, the theft could have gone undetected for months.
De Swardt posted his experience on Reddit and discovered others had similar issues.
One user reported their account "was auto-upgraded without my consent, my credit card got charged, and the usage shot from 0% to 100% automatically without me even touching it." Another saw usage jump from 0 to 49% in 12 minutes, despite only using it for a couple of prompts and a web search.
Anthropic warned users about infostealer malware stealing login sessions and consuming tokens. The company said the malware didn’t come from using Claude itself but could be picked up from many sources online. However, de Swardt received no such warning.
He insists he found no evidence his computer was compromised and still doesn’t know how hackers accessed his account.
De Swardt’s account was reinstated after about two weeks, but the difficulty of getting help and lack of itemized usage soured him on Claude. He canceled his subscription in favor of Cursor. "It’s not that much different or better," he said, adding he can’t see going back without Anthropic resolving the issue.
Source: techcrunch
