No, the receipt had no indication of it being a gift. Was with my family at the time and suddenly started getting $10 extra usage charges every few minutes. I wasn’t able to toggle off the “auto-reload funds” feature until about $180 had been drained from my checkings. For context, here’s the support ticket I sent in on March 7th.
“Hi Anthropic Support,
I'm a Max plan subscriber and I'm writing about approximately $180 in unexpected Extra Usage charges that appeared on my account between March 3-5, 2026. I attempted to resolve this through your Fin AI chatbot (Conversation ID: 215473382652967).
Here's the situation:
- I received 16 separate Extra Usage invoices between March 3-5, ranging from $10-$13 each, all charged automatically.
- I was not actively using Claude during this period — I was away from my laptop entirely.
- When I checked my usage dashboard, it showed my session at 100% usage despite me not using the product.
- My API usage dashboard shows only $70 in total lifetime usage, confirming this is not API-related.
- My Claude Code session history shows only two tiny sessions from March 5 totaling under 7KB — nowhere near enough activity to generate these charges.
This appears consistent with known billing/usage tracking issues reported by other Max plan users (GitHub issues #29289 and #24727 on the anthropics/claude-code repo), where usage meters show incorrect values and Extra Usage charges accumulate erroneously. However, it is possible that my account was compromised, and I would like assistance determining if that is the case (or if it really is a bug.)
Either way, I am requesting a refund of the Extra Usage charges from March 3-5 only — I do not want to cancel my subscription.”
“Hi Anthropic Support,
I'm a Max plan subscriber and I'm writing about approximately $180 in unexpected Extra Usage charges that appeared on my account between March 3-5, 2026. I attempted to resolve this through your Fin AI chatbot (Conversation ID: 215473382652967).
Here's the situation: - I received 16 separate Extra Usage invoices between March 3-5, ranging from $10-$13 each, all charged automatically. - I was not actively using Claude during this period — I was away from my laptop entirely. - When I checked my usage dashboard, it showed my session at 100% usage despite me not using the product. - My API usage dashboard shows only $70 in total lifetime usage, confirming this is not API-related. - My Claude Code session history shows only two tiny sessions from March 5 totaling under 7KB — nowhere near enough activity to generate these charges.
This appears consistent with known billing/usage tracking issues reported by other Max plan users (GitHub issues #29289 and #24727 on the anthropics/claude-code repo), where usage meters show incorrect values and Extra Usage charges accumulate erroneously. However, it is possible that my account was compromised, and I would like assistance determining if that is the case (or if it really is a bug.)
Either way, I am requesting a refund of the Extra Usage charges from March 3-5 only — I do not want to cancel my subscription.”