Claude account banned: how to switch to the API and keep working

Anthropic offers its products only in the countries on its list of supported regions, and Russia is not on it. In autumn 2026 users from Russia report bans of their accounts, paid ones included.

On 29 October Skillbox Media wrote about a Reddit user who lives in New Zealand on a long-term visa. His account was suspended right after an identity check with a Russian foreign passport, and the subscription had been charged two days earlier. On 5 November the author of a post on Habr described a similar case with a Max plan: the account was banned after verification with a foreign passport, and about three hours after the appeal access came back.

Anthropic does not name the reason for a particular ban. Both authors say they do not know what exactly triggered it: the document, the connection history or something else. In both cases a paid subscription did not protect the account.

A ban hits the account. You lose the Pro or Max subscription, the chats and projects on claude.ai and the Claude Code sign-in by subscription. The models do not go anywhere: you can call them through the API with a key that is not tied to your Anthropic account.

Moving to the API through a gateway does not restore the account. It will not bring back old chats and projects and changes nothing in your relationship with Anthropic. It simply gives access to the same Claude models, and for that you need no Anthropic account of your own.

If the account matters to you, start with it. The steps below follow iChip.

The odds are unpredictable. iChip gives figures for January to June 2026: 11.4 million banned accounts, 398 thousand appeals and 42 thousand bans reversed, so roughly one appeal in ten succeeded. Answers take from a few hours to two weeks and longer, and region-based bans, in the outlet's words, are almost impossible to appeal.

While the appeal is under review, you can move your work to the API. It takes three steps.

You need no Anthropic account, no VPN and no foreign card for this.

Requests are paid from the Kumo wallet or from a token package. The wallet is topped up by card, SBP or crypto; the payment page shows which methods are available. The minimum is $3; you pay in roubles at the rate shown before payment, and the wallet keeps dollars.

If there is no money and the free limit does not apply, the request does not run: the gateway answers with error 402.

You can also try it without paying. Kumo has 7 free models now, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.2 among them. No special model id or header is needed: a request to such a model costs nothing while it fits the free limit, in chat and by API alike. A new account gets a one-time Intro bonus after subscribing to the Kumo Telegram channel and confirming its e-mail, and a daily limit comes with a top-up or a package. A request that does not fit the limit goes at the normal price. Keep in mind that Claude Code sends large requests and spends the limit fast. Details are in the article about free models.

The connect script sets Claude Code up for Kumo in one command. Run it in a terminal with your key in place of kumo_sk_.... The --ru flag makes the script speak Russian; leave it out for English. For macOS and Linux:

For Windows, in PowerShell:

To keep the key out of the shell history, leave it out of the command: with the --ask-key flag the script asks for the key in the terminal.

You can undo the changes with one command; the script prints it:

Settings are read at start-up, so open a new terminal and run claude. The same command connects Codex, OpenCode, OpenClaw and Pi: in place of claude-code give the tool's name, several names separated by commas, or all. The script does not configure Cursor, Cline, Continue or Claude Desktop; separate steps for them follow below.

A curl | sh command runs the script with your rights. If you like, open connect.sh and read it first.

If you would rather not run the script, set the environment variables yourself, for example in ~/.zshrc. The gateway address for the Anthropic protocol has no /v1: Claude Code appends the path itself, and an extra /v1 gives error 404.

Take the model id from the catalogue. The last line sends the auto mode classifier's requests through Kumo, and those requests are paid from your key too. If an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY from an earlier setup is still in your environment, remove it. The settings.json variant and a one-command check are in the Kumo documentation.

Claude Desktop can work through a third-party gateway. Turn on developer mode once: Help → Troubleshooting → Enable Developer Mode; the app restarts with a Developer menu. Then open Developer → Configure Third-Party Inference… → Connection and fill in the fields.

Here too the address has no /v1. Apply the settings and start a new chat or Code session.

Cursor, Cline, Roo Code and Continue connect to Kumo as an OpenAI-compatible provider: the address https://api.kumorouter.com/v1 and your key. In Cursor only the chat with the model you picked goes through Kumo, along the «own OpenAI key» path. Tab completion and the editor's own agent features run on its servers and do not go through the gateway.

Step-by-step guides: Cursor in Russia without a VPN, Cline in VS Code and an in-depth look at Claude Code.

Through the API you pay per token. Below are Claude prices at Anthropic itself and on Kumo, by price list v55 as of 12 November 2026. At these rates Claude on Kumo is 29–45% below Anthropic's list price.

There are two ways to pay. Pay as you go: money is charged to the wallet at the rates in the table. A package: tokens for a term, paid in advance, which a model spends with the multiplier from the last column. Opus 5.5, for example, has the multiplier ×1.9: the package is charged the sum of input and output tokens times 1.9. There are now the Starter package for $5 and Pro for $20 for a month, Max for $50 for two months and Ultra from $100 for three months. Volumes and a comparison with the wallet are on the pricing page.

Current prices of the Claude models on Kumo:

Every call shows up in the Kumo console log. If an answer came back and the log has no line for it, the client did not go through the gateway.

To make sure the model behind the name is the one named, use the checks from the Claude Opus 5.5 review. You run them with your own key, and each one explains what it proves and what it does not.