[Anchor]

A domestic user of 'Claude,' an AI service from the U.S.-based company Anthropic, received a bill for over 25 billion won. As the service continued to attempt to charge this absurd amount, the user was forced to block their credit card.

Reporter Park Jaehyeon has the story.

[Reporter]

Yang Seung-min, a university student who uses Anthropic's latest agent AI, Claude Fable 5, received an email regarding his usage fees on July 8.

The email stated that he needed to pay 1.669 million dollars, which is over 2.5 billion won.

More than 10 payment attempts were actually made on Yang's card, but they were declined due to the excessively high amount.

The billed amount continued to rise afterward, eventually reaching a total of over 25.1 billion won.

Yang urgently blocked his card.

[Yang Seung-min / Claude Fable 5 User: It started at 2.46 billion won and went up to 25.16 billion won. I was terrified. I thought if that was actually charged, my life would be over.]

Yang, who had not used any services beyond his subscription plan, sent 18 emails to Anthropic. It took three days for him to receive a response, which appeared to be an automated AI reply stating it was due to an "automatic top-up setting error."

However, Yang had not used the automatic top-up function.

[Yang Seung-min / Claude Fable 5 User: There was nothing in my system settings that would have caused an erroneous charge. I received the bill, but I am in a situation where I don't know the reason why.]

In response, Anthropic stated, "We are communicating with the user and have resolved the issue."

Posts claiming that users have suffered damages due to Anthropic AI billing errors and are experiencing difficulties with refunds have also appeared on U.S. online communities such as Reddit.

Experts point out that the unilateral billing of usage fees, combined with the lack of transparency regarding how these costs are calculated, is a significant problem.

[Kim Tae-hoon / Professor at Sogang University Graduate School of Metaverse: They must clearly disclose how the internal usage led to these costs. Charging fees without such disclosure is a matter of controversy.]

In the United States, users of Anthropic's premium plans have filed a class-action lawsuit, claiming that the actual usage provided falls significantly short of what was advertised.

(Video reporting: Lee Moo-jin, Kim Nam-sung | Video editing: Kim Jin-won | Design: Kang Yoon-jung)