On October 1, multiple Claude users in Hong Kong ran into "Account Suspended" or "Access Denied" messages when they tried to log in, with paid Claude Pro subscribers among those affected. Hong Kong's local tech community, Threads, and discussion forums saw a wave of posts that day asking for help, many from developers and professionals who use Claude for coding and long-form analysis.
There's no tally yet of how many accounts were suspended. As of publication, Anthropic has not issued any public response, nor said whether it adjusted anything specific to a region or network nodes.
What users and engineers think happened
Hong Kong tech outlet Liudong Daily rounded up analysis from affected users and network engineers, pointing to three possible triggers:
- Commercial VPN data-center IPs: data-center nodes used by several popular VPN services were apparently flagged as high-risk across the board, catching every account sharing that exit;
- Payment and region checks: accounts that paid for Pro with a Hong Kong bank card tied to an overseas virtual address, or that used a third-party virtual card, may have tripped anti-fraud and regional-compliance controls;
- Frequent node switching: accounts that logged in from multiple countries or regions in quick succession appear more likely to get flagged.
These are all theories from users' side; Anthropic has not confirmed any of them.
Hong Kong was never on the list to begin with
Since Claude launched, Hong Kong has never appeared on Anthropic's list of officially supported countries and regions — neither has mainland China or Macau. Hong Kong users have mostly registered and renewed via VPNs plus overseas payment methods, and at the platform level the status has always been "usable but unsupported."
In April this year, employees at Goldman Sachs' Hong Kong office had their Claude access cut off, with Anthropic saying at the time that Hong Kong had never been officially supported; reports later said JPMorgan's Hong Kong staff were also affected by the terms. Earlier still, Anthropic updated its sales-restriction terms in September 2025 to bar companies more than 50%-owned by Chinese entities from using its services, regardless of where those companies are incorporated.
Put those steps together and the pattern is clear: enterprises and institutions got squeezed first, and now it's individual paying users' turn.
What it means for Chinese-speaking users
For individual developers in Hong Kong and mainland China, the immediate question is what happens to subscription fees already paid. There's no sign so far of any refund or appeals process from Anthropic specifically for these accounts; users are left with the standard appeal form, and outcomes vary case by case.
For companies in Hong Kong that have been routing around restrictions by using personal accounts for Claude, the risk is now out in the open. If code, contracts, and internal analysis all sit inside one personal account that could be suspended at any time, a suspension means losing access to chat history and project files all at once. Some companies are already evaluating a switch to domestic Chinese models — the gap between options like Kimi, DeepSeek, and Qwen and the leading models on coding tasks has narrowed a lot this past year, and they're a lot cheaper too.
Whether Anthropic will explain this wave of suspensions, or add Hong Kong to its supported list, there's no sign of either happening yet.
Sources: Liudong Daily, Yahoo News Hong Kong, CocoLoop, Anthropic's supported-region list and usage policy pages; the Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Hong Kong suspension incidents are as reported by financial media.