Anthropic's Prospectus Puts Account-Ban Revenue at 5-7% of Income—Pure Profit After Charging First

Haha, today I saw one point in Anthropic's latest prospectus that is too real.

I've always been curious whether a large chunk of Anthropic's revenue comes from account bans. Unexpectedly, they directly and boldly tell everyone this data.

The disclosed data: about 5%-7% is ban revenue, roughly corresponding to $1.65 billion to $2.31 billion, which is over ten billion RMB.

Moreover, this part isn't just revenue; it's basically pure profit.

Anthropic never first detects and tells you that you're not compliant; instead, it bans you after you've paid, and doesn't refund.

How much of this is contributed by Chinese users? Calling it a beast is well-deserved; it's basically equivalent to daylight robbery.

After we had quite a few Claude accounts banned before, I reverse-analyzed the local Anthropic code. Let me share it with you here so you know what it does.

1. Every time you log into Claude, it records two pieces of data in local ~/.claude.json: one is accountUuid (account info), and the other is a device-level stable identifier called device_id in telemetry. If you don't clean it, it stays on your local machine forever.

If your account is banned and you don't clean the environment, device_id remains unchanged, causing a new account to be banned within seconds.

1. Telemetry failure retry queue. Claude has local telemetry at ~/.claude/telemetry/1p_failed_events.*.json.

This data periodically sends some information about your local environment. If your node fluctuates, it records locally, then sends your real environment info when stable.

1. Config rolling backup. Located at ~/.claude/backups/.claude.json.backup.*.

That is, if you've had old account login info locally, Anthropic automatically backs it up, and these backups also retain your old account info.

1. OAuth login credentials. The local macOS keychain, ~/.claude/.credentials.json, stores old tokens and serial-number risk.

The above are the confirmed local info from analysis. There are also browser cookies, related environment variables in shell config, timezone, payment channels, nodes, etc., but I won't go into those.

However, these are only local records; the server-side ban algorithm is a black box. But I saw someone abroad using Claude on a physical machine, and I can only say it still didn't work. Even a normal American local user, if it thinks you're using it improperly, will get banned.

I can only advise everyone: don't blindly keep paying money to Anthropic. I have to admit that CC does have good capability and experience, but it's no longer far ahead. Codex, Kimi, Grok—you have way too many options.