Claude users report bans after uploading Russian passports

Claude users on Reddit, X and Telegram said on October 29 that Anthropic banned their accounts as soon as they passed an identity check with a Russian passport. One of them is a Russian living in New Zealand on a four-year visa. According to these users, the ban also reaches people who live outside Russia but hold no residence permit in another country, and Anthropic’s own help article on verification says that passing the check doesn’t protect an account created from an unsupported region.

The New Zealand user started the thread in a post on Reddit. Claude asked him to verify through Persona, a service where you pick the country that issued your document, upload a photo of it and pass a face check. Why he was asked is unknown. He says he paid for Claude and used it, along with Claude Code, for work and personal projects. The account went right after he uploaded his Russian international passport, with no explanation given, and Anthropic had already charged him for the subscription two days earlier. New Zealand, unlike Russia, is on the list of countries where Claude is officially available.

In the comments, other users with Russian documents who live in Georgia and Armenia described similar bans. The user in Georgia posted an email from Anthropic’s safety team. It says automated systems detected a large number of signals tied to his account that violate the Usage Policy, that the team reviewed those signals to confirm the system’s findings, and that his access to Claude was revoked. It doesn’t name the rule he broke.

What Anthropic’s rules cover

Anthropic’s terms say nothing about a user’s nationality or citizenship. They list the countries and regions where its products are officially supported and call everywhere else unsupported, so people located in those places can’t use the company’s services. Russia, mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao are not on the list.

Users with Chinese citizenship have run into the same checks. Some of them passed, so by these accounts a passport from an unsupported country doesn’t always end in a ban.

Identity checks themselves date back to April, when Anthropic began asking for a passport or driver’s license plus a live selfie in “some scenarios”. An outside verification provider used by banks and fintech companies runs the check.

The October wave

Since October 1, users in Hong Kong and Russia have been getting suspension emails that cite “suspicious signals” tied to the account, signals that the emails say point to a usage policy violation. In early October there were also reports of bans for users in unsupported regions, Russia among them, who reached Claude through a VPN. Some Russian users were offered an appeal in the email, and some of those appeals came back rejected as a “final decision”. Novaya Gazeta Europe and 3DNews both read the wave as stricter enforcement of the existing regional restrictions, with no new rule behind it. In this week’s complaints, users name a different trigger: the passport upload itself, including for people who don’t live in Russia.

Another user says that after he uploaded his Russian passport and was banned, he can no longer send new prompts to Claude and can only export his chat data. His appeal didn’t get the account back.