[BUG] Billing/payment system rejects valid cards for API credit purchase — support chat (Fin) closes tickets without resolution
Preflight Checklist
- [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
- [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
- [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code
What's Wrong?
I'm unable to purchase API credits on console.anthropic.com. Payment fails with "Payment to Anthropic, PBC did not go through" despite trying two different credit cards from two different banks. Both cards successfully pass 3D Secure authentication, and my banks confirm no block or decline attempt on their end — the transaction doesn't even register as an attempt.
Troubleshooting already completed:
- Billing address verified to match bank records exactly
- Business/VAT tax ID field left empty
- Tried multiple browsers, cleared cache and cookies
- No VPN in use
- Confirmed Israel is a supported billing location
- Tried two separate cards from two different banks — same decline on both
Support experience: I contacted support.claude.com multiple times over several days. Each time, the Fin AI agent responded with the same generic troubleshooting article, despite explicitly stating I had already completed every step. When I requested human escalation, conversations were closed without resolution — in one case, before I even had a chance to reply.
Details:
- Country: Israel
- Amount attempted: $5.00 (smallest credit option)
- Dates/times: July 25, 2026, ~21:12–21:22 Israel time (GMT+3), multiple attempts since
- Error reference: request_id req_011CdPEAwMnJkjodcRw3iHXZ
What Should Happen?
Payment should process normally, or support should escalate to a human agent instead of closing the ticket repeatedly with the same automated response.
Error Messages/Logs
Payment to Anthropic, PBC did not go through.
request_id: req_011CdPEAwMnJkjodcRw3iHXZSteps to Reproduce
- Go to console.anthropic.com → Billing/Credits
- Select $5 credit amount
- Enter valid card details (tried 2 different cards from 2 different banks)
- Leave VAT/tax ID field empty
- Submit payment
- Payment fails with "Payment to Anthropic, PBC did not go through"
- Contact support.claude.com — Fin AI agent repeats the same generic troubleshooting article regardless of context, and closes the conversation without human escalation
Claude Model
None
Is this a regression?
No, this never worked
Last Working Version
_No response_
Claude Code Version
N/A - this is a billing/console issue, not related to Claude Code CLI
Platform
Anthropic API
Operating System
macOS
Terminal/Shell
Terminal.app (macOS)
Additional Information
_No response_
3 Comments
Adding related public pattern context because this is a close match to an unresolved privacy-sanitized billing incident I am tracking: valid cards complete customer-side authentication or never reach the issuer, Anthropic's manual credit purchase path returns generic failure, and Fin/support loops or closures prevent payment-operations reconciliation.
Public hub: https://coolak.github.io/anthropic-claude-billing-incident/
Reconciliation matrix: https://coolak.github.io/anthropic-claude-billing-incident/reconciliation-matrix.html
The actionable ask is narrow: a human Billing Platform / payment-operations owner should compare checkout/payment-auth state, risk decisioning, invoice/order commit, and credit-ledger posting, then separately audit Fin case-closure routing. I am intentionally omitting private card, bank, invoice, payment-object, support-thread, and request identifiers in this public comment.
Closing as a duplicate of #80055 — please follow and 👍 that issue instead so we can track it in one place. If you think this was closed in error, comment here and we'll reopen.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
Got a fix, at least for me: Fix was switching from Firefox to Chrome.
I spent two days on the same pattern as many others: new org, trying to set up billing. Tried 3 different valid cards, some of which are already used in other Anthropic subscriptions and confirmed not to be at any credit limits, all declined multiple times. Quadruple-checked the addresses and even tried old addresses. Issuing banks confirmed no decline on their side.
Fin was completely unhelpful and refuses to escalate to human channels. It admitted to me it has no path turned on to do that.
The same card that had been declined ~10 times in Firefox went through immediately in Chrome. Probably some Firefox privacy thing breaking checkout flow.
Anthropic: please fix. I know this is probably your payment provider's bug; but Firefox is hardly an obscure browser. It was way too hard to pay you, coming from a company that spends > $5k/mo. This cost me a day and a half.