Fact-checking the viral 18 rules for keeping a Claude account alive

On October 28, 2025, a Chinese-language post on X laid out 18 rules for keeping a Claude account alive. It claimed that Anthropic assigns every account a hidden score, adjusts it as the account uses the product, and suspends accounts whose score falls below a threshold. Among the specific rules in the post: using Claude on Linux costs points; upgrading to Max too early is risky; signing in on multiple devices hurts the account, while using Claude on mobile or enabling memory helps it. The post offered no documentation for the scoring system, only the rules themselves.

A follow-up by a DEV Community writer took the 18 rules one by one and checked them against Anthropic's public documentation and published account enforcement statistics. The writer concluded that account suspensions do happen, but the hidden-score mechanism behind the rules has no supporting evidence: no leaked documents, no observable score users can check, and no reproducible experiment that demonstrates the point changes described. Where the post treats Linux usage, Max upgrade timing, multi-device sign-ins, mobile use, and memory as factors that move a hidden score, the writer found no documented connection between any of those behaviors and the supposed points, so the rules remain unverified and, in the writer's view, unsupported.

That is where the matter stands. The original post continues to present the 18 rules as a factual account of how Anthropic treats accounts, while the reviewer's answer is that suspensions are real but the scoring explanation offered for them cannot be confirmed from anything Anthropic has published or from data the writer could test. No third party has stepped forward to confirm the scoring system either way.