Anthropic has acknowledged a billing error that generated a $16.6 million payment demand for a South Korean Claude user who said his account showed no billable API usage.
The user first received a failed payment invoice for $1,669,875.90 on July 7. Less than 24 hours later, another invoice increased the amount almost tenfold to $16,627,739.70.
The user initially believed the invoices could be part of a phishing attempt because of the unusually large amounts.
However, he said the emails came through Anthropic’s official billing system and contained links connected to the company’s legitimate Stripe infrastructure. Stripe provides payment, invoicing, and billing services to Anthropic.
The user claimed he was on Claude’s free plan, had no payment method registered to the account, and saw zero API usage in his dashboard.
Despite this, screenshots shared by the user reportedly showed two attempted overseas transactions from a US merchant identified as Anthropic. His bank declined both attempts because they exceeded the card’s transaction limit. No money was transferred.
Anthropic later told the user that an incorrect automatic credit reload setting had generated the invalid payment requests.
The company said it disabled the setting as a precaution and restored the account’s billing configuration. It also confirmed that the incident was not caused by unauthorised access.
Anthropic told the user that its payment processor had attempted to collect the invalid amount, but the transaction was declined. It confirmed that the user did not owe the company any money.
The company has not publicly explained how the automatic reload value reached more than $16 million.
❗️ Anthropic tried to charge a Korean user who was on the free plan with zero API usage $16.6 million. A day earlier, the same invoice was $1.67 million, so it grew roughly 10x overnight.
The user says he suspected phishing at first, then found the sender and payment link were… pic.twitter.com/u9g4wjYiZ6
— International Cyber Digest (@IntCyberDigest) July 10, 2026
The user said he spent four days trying to obtain written confirmation that the invoices had been cancelled and his account had been cleared.
According to his subsequent posts, he sent around 18 emails to Anthropic and continued receiving automated responses while waiting for a human support representative. He also said the attempted payments caused his main bank card to be blocked.
The user criticised how the case was handled, arguing that an invoice of that size should have received a faster response from the company.
Anthropic’s public service-status page did not list a billing-related incident for July 7 or July 8.
The page recorded several technical problems affecting Claude models and services during those dates, but none referred to incorrect invoices or payment attempts.
The incident raised concerns online about automated billing controls, particularly when unusually large payment requests can be generated without matching the usage shown to the customer.
While the attempted transactions failed and no funds were collected, the case shows how a billing configuration error can create serious disruption even for a user reporting no paid API activity.
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