Anthropic blocked Russian users on Claude: projects and chats lost
Anthropic blocked the accounts of several hundred Russian users of Claude. Access is denied even via VPN, and people lost all their projects, chats, and files —
Anthropic has blocked the accounts of Russian users of Claude platform. According to messages on Telegram and Reddit, several hundred people have lost complete access to the service without any warnings or explanations.
Scale of the Blockade
The wave of blockades began late last week. All users from RF discovered that they cannot log into Claude — neither from a Russian IP, nor through VPN, nor through other workarounds. When attempting to log in, an error message appears that explains nothing. Access has simply disappeared.
This is especially painful for those who paid for subscriptions. Pro subscribers lost access just like free users, without compensation or a transition period. For freelancers and small teams that built workflows around Claude, this was a serious blow.
The blockade is indiscriminate — it affected both active users and those who simply registered a few months ago and forgot about the service.
What Users Lost
Each account is not just a login. Over months and years, people accumulated in Claude libraries of code, working prompts, research, and personal notes. Thousands of conversations, project context, histories with AI — all of this is now inaccessible. It is impossible to recover the data. There is no API for export, no archive for download, no way to ask support for a copy of a conversation. Everything is simply erased.
- Source code and technical projects
- Working conversations and notes accumulated over months
- Personal files and contexts for prompts
- History of solutions and approaches that were often shared
- All without a single way to export or recover
"They just blocked me without warning and that's it.
Support emails don't answer at all. It's like I never existed," wrote one user on Reddit.
Why This Happened
Anthropichas not officially commented on the situation. But the political context is clear: this is part of broader sanctions measures against RF that have tightened after 2022. All 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. And Anthropic chose the most radical path — instantaneous complete blockade of existing accounts without warning.
The decision is quite harsh and damages Anthropic's 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 about the cost of dependence on American services. Local alternatives like Yandex GPT stop being an option — they become a necessity. For companies that built workflows around Claude, an urgent reassessment of risks is needed.