A strange bug has occurred where simply writing 'HERMES.md' in the commit message incurs additional charges for Claude Code.
Sasha-id, an engineer using Claude Code, has reported a bug where additional charges are incurred for Claude Code if the commit message contains the text 'HERMES.md'.
HERMES.md in git commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing instead of plan quota · Issue #53262 · anthropics/claude-code
With Claude Code, a certain 'usable amount' is allocated depending on the plan you have subscribed to. Furthermore, if a user has purchased credits, once the available amount is exceeded, a pay-as-you-go system will automatically begin, and the credits will be consumed.
Sasha-id was subscribed to the Max 20x plan, and even though he had only used 13% of his weekly allocation, $200.98 (approximately 32,000 yen) in credits was used up prematurely, resulting in an error message stating 'Insufficient remaining data' and causing Claude Code to stop working.
Sasha-id conducted a detailed investigation of numerous commits and discovered that if the commit message of a Git repository contained the words 'HERMES.md', credits would be consumed for API requests regardless of the allocated amount.
Sasha-id's findings are as follows: Additional charges were incurred only when the commit message contained the exact words 'HERMES.md'. If the case was different or the file name was 'HERMES.md', the system behaved normally.
In addition, sasha-id posted a reply from Anthropic's support AI at the same time as the bug report. The support AI acknowledged the bug but stated, 'However, please understand that we cannot compensate for technical errors that lead to service degradation or incorrect billing routing.'
Afterward, an Anthropic representative replied, 'Thank you for reporting this! It appears our fraud prevention system was over-activated. We have fixed it,' but sasha-id's message, 'You're welcome! Can I get a refund right now?' was ignored.
The incident was posted on X on April 26, 2026, Japan time, attracting attention with 1.47 million views. A full day later, on April 27, 2026, information was received from Thariq , the developer of Claude Code, stating that 'the refund process is underway.'
ugh sorry this was a bug with the 3rd party harness detection and how we pull git status into the system prompt
— Thariq (@trq212) April 26, 2026
we're reaching out to affected users and giving them a refund + another month of credits (in this case another $200)
However, it seems that the refund was not processed even after more than a full day had passed. This incident became a topic of discussion on the news sharing site 'Hacker News' around 4:00 AM JST on April 30, 2026, and the refund was finally processed at 1:00 PM JST on the same day.
Sasha-id sarcastically commented on the situation, saying, 'It seems that using Hacker News is the quickest way to get support at Anthropic these days.'
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