Error messages

Your account has been disabled after an automatic review of your recent activities.

Your account has been disabled after an automatic review of your recent activities.

You open claude.ai or the Claude app and you're stopped at the door with this:

Your account has been disabled after an automatic review of your recent activities.

Some people see a shorter version that ends at "after an automatic review." Either way it's a ban. It shuts out Claude Code too, if that's signed in with the same account. One user on GitHub, issue #37057, got it on March 18, 2026, right after upgrading to Max (and was charged about $209 over three days, by their account).

Why Anthropic disables accounts

Anthropic's Safeguards warnings and appeals page (last updated July 9, 2026) lists three reasons it may ban an account:

• Repeated violations of the Usage Policy
• Account creation from an unsupported location, meaning a country where Claude isn't offered
• Terms of Service violations

That's the whole list Anthropic publishes. We looked for a page explaining what the "automatic review" actually checks and didn't find one, so we've no idea, and the blog posts blaming VPNs or phone numbers are guessing too. And the message won't tell you which of the three applied.

How to appeal

The appeal goes through the account that was banned. Anthropic's instructions are to "go to claude.ai, log in with your banned account, and fill out the appeal form." The form lives at claude.ai/restricted, and the help page warns "You must be logged in to access the appeal form." So sign in first, then open the link. Anthropic's Safeguards team (the group that handles bans) reviews it.

Expect a bit of a wait. As of October 1, 2026 the same page carries a note that "response times are currently longer than normal" because of a jump in email volume.

There's an email address on that page too, usersafety@anthropic.com, but it's for disputing a warning. Bans go through the form.

What you can do while you wait

A banned account can still log in to export its data or delete itself, and you don't need to contact Anthropic for either. Those options sit on the same screen as the appeal form. Anthropic says every banned user can delete their account, but exports "may be restricted" depending on which policy was broken. Think before deleting, though: that's the account you're trying to get back.

Making a fresh account with the same email won't get you back in. Anthropic's account creation page says that if your old account "was disabled for Usage Policy violations, you won't be able to create new accounts with the email address associated with the disabled account, regardless of waiting period."

If your appeal worked but the message is still there

It does happen. In issue #51588, opened April 21, 2026, a user posted the reinstatement email from Anthropic ("we investigated this decision and reinstated your account") and said login still showed the disabled message after clearing the cache and trying a private window. They'd tried support and the usersafety address and only got automated replies. Nobody from Anthropic had answered on the issue as of October 1, 2026, and we found no published fix.

If you're part of a Team or Enterprise organization that was paused, it's a different screen. Your own account can be fine while the organization is on hold, and there's a "Request a review" button next to it.