[backprop1989]

Exactly, now you’re a bank (or maybe selling unlicensed securities, either way it’s jeopardy).

We ended up revising the contract so that the credits expired after three years. That opened up its own suboptimal outcomes. It was a lesson that was very much learned by us.

On the topic itself - agreed that Anthropic should take a step back and review its policy around comms and good will in general. They’re supposed to be the “good guys” in the AI game - being up front about this stuff is table stakes for them at this point.

[jkaplowitz]

> Exactly, now you’re a bank (or maybe selling unlicensed securities, either way it’s jeopardy).

This seems unlikely - after all, a US federal law (the Credit CARD Act of 2009) requires closed-loop (store/brand-specific) gift cards to be valid for at least 5 years after activation and some states like Florida and California don't allow them to expire at all, so for simplicity national companies don't usually let them expire at all regardless of state. But neither a 5-year expiration nor indefinite validity turns the seller into a bank or an unlicensed securities seller or otherwise puts them in jeopardy.

Naturally, service credits and gift cards are probably treated differently by the CARD Act, but service credits are still not a source of legal jeopardy in the sense you were describing of being an unauthorized participant in the regulated financial world, any more than gift cards are.

I can completely believe, however, that an approach similar to how gift cards must be handled is financially worse on the company's accounting statements than quickly expiring credits. That worse financial accounting consequence would be a completely sufficient explanation for why the company switched approaches.

[yial]

With gift cards you end up creating a liabilities account and tracking the outstanding value of your issued gift cards.

This is almost easier if you have a gift card processor who holds the funds for you, but most I’ve worked with either just facilitate transferring money (as in franchises ) or simply processing the initial payment.

This means you then have to track your outstanding. Depending on the state, if you cease operations you may need to escheat the value of the liability account or pay the purchasers of the gift cards if you know who they are. (Newer POS systems make this possible at times ).

Gift cards on a financial statement are nearly always a negative or neutral, as while the money is in a liability account, I’ve seen companies in trouble not actually have the funds to cover the liability.

[htrp]

"you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"