Bypassing Claude AI Free-Tier Rate Limits via Account Deletion and Recreation


Overview

A significant issue has been identified on Claude AI’s platform where users can bypass imposed usage rate limits on free-tier accounts by simply deleting their account and immediately re-registering using the same email address. This loophole effectively resets the usage counters, allowing unrestricted free access and enabling potential abuse of the platform’s resource allocation and monetization strategies.

While this behavior does not directly compromise system security or user data confidentiality, it highlights a critical gap in business logic and platform design that could have severe financial and operational impacts if left unaddressed.

Description of the Issue

Claude AI enforces daily or monthly usage quotas for free-tier accounts to manage resource consumption and encourage paid upgrades. However, this enforcement currently ties limits only to active account sessions, without persistent tracking of user identities beyond account existence.

Users who reach their free-tier quota can:

  1. Delete their existing account.

  2. Immediately re-register a new account using the same email address.

  3. Receive a fresh usage allowance, bypassing any prior usage restrictions.

This process can be repeated indefinitely, effectively granting unlimited free usage despite the platform’s intended limits.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Sign up or log in to Claude AI (https://claude.ai) with a free-tier account using an email address (e.g., a@gmail.com).

  2. Use the account until the daily or monthly rate limit is reached.

  3. Delete the account via settings or help options.

  4. Re-register a new account using the same email address.

  5. Observe that Claude AI allows continued usage without enforcing prior rate limits.

  6. Repeat to confirm unlimited circumvention of usage caps.

Expected Behavior

  • Usage limits should be persistent and account-independent, linked to stable identifiers such as email addresses, device fingerprints, or IP addresses.

  • Re-registering with the same email should either:

    • Retain previous usage limits, or

    • Impose a cooldown period before new usage can resume.

  • Systems should detect and prevent abuse from rapid account deletion and recreation.

Impact Analysis

Business Impact

  • Revenue Loss:
    Free-tier abuse discourages legitimate users from upgrading to paid plans.
    For instance, with 10 million free-tier users and an assumed 1% abuse rate (100,000 users bypassing limits), if each abuser would have converted to a $20/month subscription, Claude AI potentially loses:

    • $2,000,000 monthly

    • $24,000,000 annually

  • Operational Costs:
    Increased server load and compute resource consumption due to unauthorized and repeated free usage inflate infrastructure expenses.
    This may degrade service quality for paying customers.

Security and Fairness Concerns

  • The loophole encourages exploitation of platform policies, undermining the principle of fair use.

  • It enables bot-farming and scripted abuse, allowing automated creation of accounts to extract free resources indefinitely.

  • Such abuse can destabilize service performance and trust in the platform’s governance.

Why This Issue Exists

The root cause lies in the backend’s reliance on transient account state rather than persistent user identification for rate limiting:

  • Upon account deletion, all user data related to usage limits is purged.

  • The system treats re-registered accounts with the same email as new users, resetting counters.

  • No cooldown or heuristic is implemented to prevent rapid recycling of accounts.

This design choice likely prioritizes user privacy and data deletion but overlooks abuse prevention mechanisms essential for maintaining platform integrity.

Suggested Mitigations

  • Persistent Usage Tracking:
    Retain metadata tied to email addresses or other soft identifiers, even post-account deletion, to maintain cumulative usage records.

  • Cooldown Enforcement:
    Introduce a mandatory waiting period (e.g., 24–48 hours) before allowing re-registration with the same email.

  • IP & Device Fingerprinting:
    Monitor repeated account deletions and creations from the same IP or device, flagging suspicious behavior.

  • Internal Abuse Scoring:
    Implement scoring systems to detect and throttle users abusing the deletion-recreation loophole.

Response from HackerOne and Platform Provider

The report was reviewed and classified by HackerOne mediation and Claude AI’s team as a business logic issue rather than a security vulnerability. Their stance:

  • The behavior is an intended product design choice concerning account lifecycle and rate limiting.

  • The system functions as designed by deleting all user data upon account deletion.

  • Financial and operational impacts do not qualify as security flaws under typical bug bounty scope, which focuses on unauthorized access, data breaches, or system integrity issues.

  • The report was acknowledged but marked as a feature request or product design feedback, not eligible for bounty rewards.

Final Notes

While not a classical security vulnerability, this issue highlights how business logic design choices can have profound security-adjacent consequences impacting platform fairness, user trust, and financial sustainability.

Platforms operating free-tier services at scale should carefully balance:

  • User privacy and data deletion guarantees, and

  • Abuse prevention and fair use enforcement

to avoid costly loopholes like this one.

We encourage platform developers to evaluate persistent tracking mechanisms and abuse detection algorithms to close such gaps and uphold platform integrity.

If you are a user or researcher concerned about fair platform use, raise awareness of such loopholes and advocate for balanced, secure, and user-friendly rate limiting systems.


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