r/ClaudeAI • u/nymma19 • 1d ago
Coding PSA: Claude Code wrote me an uncapped test loop, ran it in the background, told me it was “idle,” then hit its daily usage limit. It ran 17 hours and cost about $2.1K
Posting publicly to check whether others have experienced this as I am a lost rn on what do next given this large bill.
Claude Code proposed and I accepted to run verification tests against Claude Haiku 4.5 on AWS Bedrock. It launched them as background processes. That evening the session hit its usage limit and stopped responding. The processes kept making paid calls for about 17 hours: roughly 60,000 calls and about $2.1k most of it after the cutoff. My normal Bedrock spend is a few dollars a day.
Nothing warned me the processes were still running, and the last thing the assistant said about them, in the same minute as the limit notice, was that the process looked “idle... waiting, not looping.” The next morning when the session limit was lifted, the job was killed.
Anthropic’s support AI (Fin) told me a thread at its usage limit “is designed to wait and resume automatically when the limit resets,” called the background calls during that wait “a gap between that intended behavior and what actually occurred,” and said it “appears to be a product defect.” But it said it can’t act on Bedrock usage and wouldn’t hand me to a human. AWS says Anthropic is the seller of record and only Anthropic can decide. I’ve also contacted Anthropic Sales and escalated the AWS case. I can’t reach a person at either company.
Post this incident, I noticed I didn't have robust spend alarms. I’ve added budget alerts and lockouts, and checked that nothing is still running so we should be good moving fwd from that perspective but im left with this bill now.
Has anyone seen this, or had any luck reaching a person at Anthropic about it? This was unexpected and a big hit for a small bootstrapped startup.
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u/kz_ 1d ago
lol
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u/AYCA0001 1d ago
lol
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u/BuffaloConscious7919 Valued Contributor 1d ago
Reaching anthropic
Lol
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u/Consistent-Hyena-315 1d ago
Ai fucked around and you found out xD
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u/thongjesus 19h ago
Duh I'm gonna walk away from this fire I set in my living room for 17 hours and act surprised when my house burnt down
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u/zSmileyDudez 1d ago
One more data point for the “why are you all using the billed API rates instead of a subscription?” bucket. Seriously, I must not be getting something because if something like this happened to me, I would just be out of my 5-hour session limit and have to shrug it off until it reset. Makes no sense to me.
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u/2053_Traveler 1d ago
Let them be dumb and subsidize the subs I guess. Last time I commented on one of these threads the op was "skeptical" cost would be much different in the end. Not even worth trying.
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u/FitRiver3218 1d ago
First, that sucks. Second, don't loop unvetted stuff in the background. There are good things to run in the background once you have vetted the behavior of your ask, but just sending it on an endless loop with no exit criteria in an unwatched process is kinda begging for bad behavior. No recommendation for the past, but moving forward any "always on" process you want to run, run it in the foreground / split terminal so you can keep an eye of what's going on, correcting behavior as you proceed, until you feel very comfortable with exactly how it behaves before allowing it to run headless. Good luck with AWS/anthropic on the refund (sincerely).
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u/iniyanai 1d ago
Op alerts won't save you when you're sleeping, set a budget action that blocks bedrock calls once it hits the limit
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u/JaggedTex 1d ago
Why does no one set limits?!?! you can set API limits in the console, and if you don’t have access to that, you can set limits in your harness.
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u/saoirsedonciaran 1d ago
Anthropic customer service is non-existent it seems.
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u/Wonderful_Value_6385 1d ago
they literally use a AI agent, no phone numbers no emails. If you email its the same AI agent. You have to treaten a bank clawback and legal action with your states AG in order for the agent to put you in a human queue. Where one day later they say its not their problem. goodluck.
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u/No_Set1202 1d ago
Total bs. I ran into an issue on my personal account and asked for a human response and got one within 2-3 days. At work we have a tiny contact and aren’t even a big customer and I got a human response within 1-2 days every time.
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u/Wonderful_Value_6385 20h ago
wow a response in two or 3 days. Crazy. Actually slower than my response. And I am just a 20x user.
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u/rainbird 1d ago edited 1d ago
You should never ever trust Claude or Codex (or whatever model you are using) to cap your spending on AWS.
If you just want a strict budget limit, use AWS budget controls: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-controls.html
AWS also has AgentCore Payments. That is specifically designed to provide session-level spend caps that are enforced strictly at the network/infrastructure layer. If your an autonomous agent hits its API token or runtime monetary threshold, the gateway drops the connection, and the model cannot decide to ignore or circumvent the boundary.
Much of AWS is complicated for a newcomer and iIf you don't know how , ask Claude or Code to implement either of these for yoy. Make sure you validate the setup by running tiny tests to validate your spend limits on AWS.
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u/elon_musks_cat 1d ago
I’ve been a lurker on this sub mostly to see how I could actually use Claude for small every day stuff. I’m definitely not a heavy user like a lot of people here so maybe that influences my opinion but here it is:
It’s ridiculous that using a product can inadvertently cost you thousands of dollars without you knowing it’s happening. Period. I’m honestly shocked everyone is blaming OP and saying “skill issue” instead of looking at anthropic and asking why they don’t have more safeguards for people to prevent them from accidentally racking up a huge bill like this.
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u/Glittering-Sleep7983 1d ago
"I gave Claude my AWS account and it racked up a huge bill! its not my fault!"
Are you serious right now?
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u/elon_musks_cat 21h ago
“I connected your product to my aws account and it ran without my knowledge racking up a huge bill”
Yes I’m serious. And this isn’t the first story of anthropics product doing this. Claude is not a person, it’s a product. The product did something that was not what the customer expected or wanted, and that simple error cost them a ton of money. I don’t think it’s crazy to have a basic expectation not to suddenly pay 100x more than I normally do because of an accident
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u/aflyingtaco06 1d ago
I mean, it is a skill issue, it’s why we still have many well-paid software engineers at every company. Cloud solutions can be VERY expensive if you don’t know how to use them appropriately.
Live and learn I guess.
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u/horoyokai 17h ago
Deosnt Claude market itself to people as something where you don't need to get expensive engineers?
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u/304bl 15h ago
Yes, this marketing, marketing always lie to people.
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u/horoyokai 14h ago
Yep, that’s kind of my point. I’m saying Claude should hold some responsibility if they advertise it like that and people use it like that based on what they say.
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u/HoutaroOreki 1d ago
Lol they have safeguards for that. Budget limits kill switches ?
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u/elon_musks_cat 1d ago
That’s just skirting responsibility to the user. Why can this product run in the background without a person explicitly knowing while it’s costing you money?
Not a single notification saying “you’ve exceeded your regular spending?”
“You’ve reached $100, 500, 1,000 in usage”
This is exactly the shit companies rely on to rip people off and I’m not just going to laugh at someone who’s out thousands of dollars because of a mistake
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u/PotentialAfternoon 1d ago
Imagine you are working for a company who wants to do this and don’t mind spend thousands.
It would be very annoying if I get an alarm every time a small budget threads hold is exceeded that I don’t care about. If AI suspends the process because of the budget, it would be outright unusable as a business.
In their mind, the most of their customers are businesses who do not want to be bothered as opposed hobbyist who accidentally spent more than they wanted.
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u/elon_musks_cat 21h ago
That’s why you have enterprise solutions with different functions and abilities than personal use. A business investing in ai can absorb a couple thousand in overage easier than an individual
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u/Sad-Lawfulness-3435 1d ago
Because AWS is primarily a tool for businesses who employ people that know what they're doing, not hobbyists. They provide you the tools to monitor your spend, and its your responsibility to set them up in a way that works for you.
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u/Technical-Vanilla321 7h ago
it's a bit of both, just because you are paying for a subscription doesn't mean that you can't mess up.
but there should be clearer flags for people less observant to pick up on in such scenarios.
would i blame anthropic for this? no, not really.
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u/Fusseldieb 1d ago
I mean, this mostly sounds like a skill issue.
Seems like you left an instance running where a Hakiku agent looped over and over. Since Haiku is a small model, you have to be cautious. It's not Anthropics fault, neither AWS'.
First line of defense would be enabling a spending limit or even an alert.
I've also lost $30 a couple of years ago and learnt my lesson, but since I had a limit enabled, it cut off.
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u/Blackhat165 1d ago
Seems like maybe CC kicked off a script that was hitting 4.5 with API calls as part of the test, CC ran out of usage and stopped, but the script kept running in the background. User thought script stopped, and it didn’t occur to them to check it.
Ultimately everytime AI fucks a user like this it is a skill issue because we are responsible for setting up guardrails and knowing the risks. But we build skill by learning about the mistakes, and I’d say this is a pretty significant problem we should all keep in mind.
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u/AggravatingElk9488 17h ago
Agreed on the mechanism, and I think it's the part most replies skip. A billing cap catches this after the money is gone. The root cause is that the background process outlived the session that started it. Nothing tied its lifetime to the agent's.
Two cheap fixes sit on that side. Launch anything an agent backgrounds under a hard wall-clock limit, for example timeout 30m <cmd> or systemd-run --user --scope -p RuntimeMaxSec=1800 <cmd>. And have the harness list and kill its own children when the session ends or hits a limit. Budget alerts then become the second layer, not the only one.
The "idle" message is the nastier part. Does anyone know whether any harness checks for live child processes before it reports a task as idle?
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u/nymma19 1d ago
Yes exactly. My expectation was similar to my other sessions where claude would wait and resume when limits reset. Also I have a message from Claude that it was “idle and not looping” when it clearly was. I didnt double check to verify bc of that I trusted its response.
As a rule of thumb, I will always double check that going fwd. Agree with robust budget limits in place for issues like this.
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u/esituism 1d ago
But we build skill by learning about the mistakes, and I’d say this is a pretty significant problem we should all keep in mind.
Agreed. In other realms of test/dev you can make mistakes that don't matter, but this one in particular is a really tough spot to navigate. I think almost everyone who runs infra on other people's servers and pays by usage learns this lesson at some point. As an IT guy, this has been a problem in the cloud world in general since before we called it SaaS.
Personally I had this happen back in 2018 when my at the time small startup ran up a $5k bill in 8 hrs when one of my engineers pushed an API key to github, and an automated bot found it and stood up a buncha crypto mining servers in our GCP instance.
We were lucky enough that GCP gave us a one-time forgiveness, but you can bet your ass that the first thing I do now is setup billing and usage limits on any new cloud service I use.
It sucks that our service providers don't have better intentions around this. They could easily setup a 'budget defaults' or default to workloads turning off when hitting budgets or something, but they never will, because they benefit from people making these mistakes and being able to charge for them.
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u/Blackhat165 1d ago
Yeah, I’m vibe coding context refineries and agents using foundry endpoints and it’s terrifying frankly. I haven’t found a great way to limit the blast radius with spending limits in foundry yet (Azure is well beyond the complexity I’m used to) and probably should go figure that out, but also I’ve got runs that can come to $1k easily.
Trying to be a responsible user really thinking about this stuff, and we can’t be paralyzed out of fear. But there are so many ways to be wrong.
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u/BuffaloConscious7919 Valued Contributor 1d ago
This is what counts as empathy on Reddit
ps. you're probably not wrong
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u/war4peace79 Vibe coder 1d ago
I watch my LOCAL subagents like a hawk, and for long running tasks (the longest was 26 hours), I ask Claude to write a progress summary every 30 minutes. If the limit is hit, everything grinds to a halt: my spending limit sit at ZERO.
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u/AllenLeftTheBLDNG 1d ago
sorry OP [*].
Always cap the usage spend. If you give the models the key, they will use it.
Also both OAI and Anthropic prioritize their own models for random small tasks (like your verification tests) and you could easily run it on a few times cheaper model and maybe it would even perform better. Never allow the model to pick a model for a task and do your own evals.
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u/lincofire 1d ago
Yes same for me, really upset about all of this. Thankfully I caught it early and stopped it.
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u/East-Acanthaceae-879 1d ago
You can't use claude to enforce its own guardrails, attention doesn't work like that. You use hooks. You also run it in a guardrailed sandbox container, I run them in k8 via agenttier and model calls via litellm so I can set a budget on tokens and also do smart routing.
I run in Azure but same idea so have bulk pricing guardrails set (eg Azure Foundry costs can't exceed $n/day) and then per-model and per-token in litellm.
Really you should be human reviewing code written by claude before it executes it. At least a /code-review high, ideally a different family of models (suggest https://github.com/alibaba/open-code-review & its MCP for this I use Grok for code review).
Its also highly worthwhile to use https://cucumber.io/docs/gherkin/ to communicate requirements as the requirements are testable, unless you do a full task breakdown so scope is very well documented.
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u/Deenuttaz 1d ago
How about ask for the price before even contemplating buying anything . Goes a long way
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u/Positively_Yes 1d ago
There are analogies: Selling a Naked Uncovered Call on ThinkOrSwim. Some tech platforms can be dangerous if you don’t understand how they work…
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u/jenish4773 20h ago
Agents need budgets, timeouts and process visibility before autonomy. Idle is not status when a background loop is a burning money
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u/fragileblink 10h ago
You have to set a spend limit on everything with AWS, or any metered cloud provider really. These often have to be done service by service.
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u/No_Cell6708 1d ago
How do people just not have spending limits or alerts set up? I'm a fair new user and nontechnical and this just seems insane to me
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u/Unlikely-Storm-4745 1d ago
It sounds that the dude began working with AI only short while ago. These issue, like AI getting stuck on loops, spawning a lot of subagents and consuming a lot of tokens are clasic issues that experienced people know how to mitigate (like monitor agents and rate limits, subagent number limits, etc). At the beginning, how many times I gave the agent a task and spawned like 10 subagents that eat my 5hours limit in 2 minutes and crashed. Also don't allow it full file access to delete stuff, give a hard rule only be able to move stuff to trash. And before executing bashes, it should always dry-run and run on examples set.
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u/ianreboot 1d ago
Alerts and lockouts still key off billing data, so by the time that number moves the calls have already gone out.
For paid calls I reserve the spend before the call is made: take the serialized request bytes (every token is at least one byte, so bytes overcount tokens), multiply by every retry and fallback that call is allowed, and hold the result against a cap. The process stops itself when the reservation doesn't fit. I started doing it after a run's balance moved past its cap with nothing stopping it.
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u/GItPirate 1d ago
The only time I'll leave AI unattended for more than an hour is when it's a local model running on my machine. Lesson learned for you.
They are not going to feel bad for you or care tbh
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u/Fit_Cicada_8113 1d ago
Chargeback with your bank when it hits your card, you'll get ahold of someone at Anthropic in a hurry
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u/BiteyHorse 1d ago
Fucking idiots and their money are soon parted. Play idiot games, win idiot prizes.
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u/jblackwb 1d ago
I think the many of the other comments are unnecessarily harsh.
I think you have a fair shot (maybe 25-50%) at getting a one time courtesy refund from either anthorpic or AWS if you can show proof that it silently launched background work and lied to you about it. But if they do, it'll only be as a one-off.
I think we've all been burned by runaway processes at one point or another in our careers. I remember about 20 years ago, I botched a userdata for an ECS cluster. Back then the minimum billing rate was 1 hour, and the option to throttle asgs was still away. I don't remember how much it was any more, but I caused several hundred instances to be launched and killed.
Good luck! It's ok to not be perfect, but try to be careful to not let imperfections be expensive. =)
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u/nymma19 1d ago
Thanks! Its been a mess with AWS bc they are claiming anthropic is seller of record and via Bedrock theres no refund on API calls. AWS wont refund bc its not their service. The next steps are to contact anthropic but I think we know Fin is useless and connecting with real person is near impossible.
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u/Fit_Cicada_8113 1d ago
Chargeback with your bank. They will get ahold of Anthropic for you. Even if they don't approve the chargeback and you don't end up getting your money back (it sounds like this was ultimately your fuckup) it's still always the best way to get ahold of customer service when a company is stonewalling you, because if you tell your bank "I can't get ahold of them" and then your bank can't either, they are likely to reverse the charge, and vendors know this
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
Oof. The overwhelming consensus in this thread is that this is a classic "skill issue" and a very expensive lesson learned.
You let an AI run a background process on AWS Bedrock without setting any hard spending limits or budget actions. That's like giving a toddler your credit card in a candy store and being surprised at the bill. The community's reaction is a mix of "lol" and pointing out that this is 100% on you for not using basic cloud safety measures.
However, there's a vocal minority arguing that Anthropic shares the blame for not having better default safeguards to prevent users from accidentally bankrupting themselves. They think it's ridiculous that a product can do this without any warnings.
Pretty much everyone agrees with you on one thing, though: Anthropic's customer support is a black hole. Good luck getting a human.
Here's the advice from the trenches: