Anthropic blocks Russian users from Claude: projects and chats lost

Anthropic has blocked the accounts of Russian users of the Claude platform. According to posts on Telegram and Reddit, several hundred people lost all access to the service without any warning or explanation.

Scale of the blocking

The wave of blocks began late last week. Every user in Russia found they could not get into Claude, whether from a Russian IP, through a VPN or by any other workaround. Attempts to log in return an error that explains nothing. Access simply vanished.

It hurts most for those who paid for a subscription. Pro subscribers lost access the same way free users did, with no compensation and no grace period. For freelancers and small teams that built their workflow around Claude, this is a serious blow.

The blocking is indiscriminate: it hit active users as well as people who signed up a few months ago and forgot about the service.

What users lost

An account is not just a login. Over months and years, people built up libraries of code, working prompts, research and personal notes in Claude. Thousands of conversations, project context and AI histories are now inaccessible.

The data cannot be recovered. There is no export API, no archive to download, and no way to ask support for a copy of a conversation. Everything has simply been wiped.

• Source code and technical projects
• Working conversations and notes accumulated over months
• Personal files and context for prompts
• A history of solutions and approaches that were often shared
• All of it with no single way to export or restore it

"They just blocked me with no warning, and that's it.

Support doesn't answer my emails at all. It's as if I never existed," one user wrote on Reddit.

Why this happened

Anthropic has not officially commented on the situation. But the political context is clear: this is part of the broader sanctions against Russia, which tightened after 2022. All the major American AI companies are gradually restricting access from Russia.

OpenAI previously blocked individual regions at the API level. DeepSeek simply does not allow registration. Anthropic chose the most radical path: an instant, total block of existing accounts without warning.

The decision is quite harsh and damages Anthropic's own reputation. It is a signal to other developers: even if you are a paying customer, political circumstances can take everything away in an instant.

What this means

For the Russian AI community, this is a painful lesson in the cost of depending on American services. Local alternatives such as Yandex GPT are no longer an option but a necessity. Companies that built their workflows around Claude need to reassess their risks urgently.