Someone sold Anthropic access they did not have

I booked a rental car at Faro airport once, at about half the going price. That should have been the whole story. Instead it was the reason I booked it.

At the counter there was another €750 before the car left the lot. Insurance. I had already paid for insurance online. Walking away cost me more than staying, so I paid it.

Nothing went wrong at that counter. It went wrong weeks earlier, when I agreed to terms I did not read.

That is a holiday, so it cost me €750 and a bad hour. The same offer arrives at work with better manners. A partner, a reseller, someone who can get you the same software/AI seats cheaper than the vendor lists them. Sooner or later as a Marketing or Sales leader, you are going to say yes to one of those, and why not? The quality is identical and the price is lower. If that is on your desk this quarter, this is what is worth knowing before you sign.

On 10 September Anthropic published its threat intelligence report, covering misuse it disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026.

One case: a group selling discounted Claude access that was neither cheap nor Claude. Traffic was rerouted to a different model, and the reseller's own software took the customer's real Anthropic login and sold it on. None of that is visible from the buying side.

Start with the fair reading. A cheaper seat through a partner is often just a cheaper seat. If it's not broke, don't try to fix it.

Here is the part that matters. Your team logs in through a reseller, and one Tuesday the login stops working. Or worse, it keeps working, and you find out later that everything typed into it went somewhere you did not agree to.

Now try to fix it. Your team doesn't hold the account, so they cannot log in and look. You do not have a contract with Anthropic, so you cannot call them. You have a contract with a company that holds your login and your money, and their phone is ringing out.

That is the counter at Faro. The moment it goes wrong, all that is left is what it costs to undo.

Two questions settle it, and they cost you a minute before you sign. Whose name is the account in, and can I log in to it myself. Then: does the money go to the reseller, or to Anthropic.

Ask those two on the day you agree to buy the cheaper seats via an intermediary and they are paperwork. Ask them on the Tuesday the login dies and they are a discovery, made on the worst day of the quarter.

So the question is not what a seat costs. It is who is exposed when it goes wrong, me or them.

Do you have an offer like that on the table right now, for Anthropic, OpenAI or anything else?