Short answer
Hong Kong is not on Anthropic's list of supported regions, and since early October 2026 Anthropic has been suspending accounts it sees connecting through a VPN. Appeals are mostly rejected, and a new account behind a VPN runs the same risk. If you use Claude for coding, the steady way out is to stop relying on a personal Anthropic account: point Claude Code at an API gateway such as TeamoRouter with two environment variables and pay per use.
What happened in October 2026
On October 2, 2026 the South China Morning Post reported that Hong Kong users who reached Claude through a VPN had their accounts suspended without warning, some after six months of paid use, and that appeals were rejected. The same week, users in Russia reported a large wave of suspensions for the same reason.
The rule behind it is not new. Anthropic only serves the countries on its supported-regions list, which does not include mainland China, Hong Kong or Macau. What changed is enforcement: VPN exit nodes and datacenter IP ranges are now detected more aggressively, and accounts that look like they're used from an unsupported region are closed.
What doesn't help
- A new account behind a better VPN. It's the same pattern the detection is looking for, and a paid Pro or Max plan is lost when the account is closed.
- Appeals. Reports from this wave say they're mostly rejected when the account was used from an unsupported region.
- Buying an account from a reseller. Shared and resold accounts are exactly what gets closed first.
Keep using Claude Code through the API
Claude Code can talk to any endpoint that speaks the Anthropic API. With a gateway, requests go to the gateway with your gateway key, and you never sign in to an Anthropic account, so there's no personal account to suspend.
- Create an API key in the TeamoRouter console.
- Point Claude Code at the gateway:
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.teamorouter.com
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<your TeamoRouter API key>
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=""
claude --model claude-opus-5-5
- If Claude Code was signed in before, run
claude /logoutfirst so it picks up the new settings.
Full setup on Windows, macOS and Linux: Claude Code docs. For chat instead of coding, the same key works in Claude Desktop and Cherry Studio.
What it costs
There's no subscription; you pay for the tokens you use. Anthropic's list price for Claude Opus 5.5 is $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, and Sonnet 5.5 is $2 / $10. Through TeamoRouter the same models cost about 30% of the list price at the time of writing (live prices on the Opus 5.5 model page). A typical Claude Code task on Opus 5.5 comes to roughly $0.15 instead of about $0.50 at list price. Top up by card or Alipay from $5; see billing for all payment options.
FAQ
Can my Anthropic account be restored? You can appeal through Anthropic's support page, but if the account was used from Hong Kong, reports from this wave say appeals are mostly rejected.
Do I need a VPN for the gateway? No. Claude Code connects to api.teamorouter.com, not to Anthropic's servers.
Is it the real Claude? Yes, the same Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 models. You can compare outputs against the public pelican benchmark, which reruns the same prompt every 30 minutes.
What about users in mainland China or Russia? The same approach works; see How to use Claude in China and Claude Code banned: reasons and what to do.