Anthropic’s Claude AI told users that PlanetScale got shut down - it’s a lie

PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert went public on X after Anthropic’s Claude AI started telling developers the whole database platform had shut down.

Screenshots from real chats show the model claiming PlanetScale “wound down the entire hosted database product” as of January 2025. It advised people to switch to Supabase, Neon, or Turso instead and even listed self-hosted options like Vitess for anyone still stuck on old projects.

In one thread about the Vercel AI SDK on Cloudflare Workers, Claude flatly said PlanetScale stopped accepting new databases in early 2024 and was no longer a good fit.

That’s not true.

PlanetScale is still running. It launched Postgres support in general availability last September and has been adding features steadily. The only big change was ending its free Hobby tier back in April 2024. Paid databases have stayed open the whole time. Major customers, including Cursor, Intercom, and Block, keep using it without issue.

Lambert says the company has reported more than 20 separate cases of this exact misinformation to Anthropic. So far, there’s been zero fixes. Another developer confirmed the same false shutdown claim hit him last week.

PlanetScale employee Holly Guevara also quoted Sam Lambert’s post and asked, “Honestly, at what point does this stuff become defamation?” She added, “Telling millions of people that we shut down, giving incorrect info about our products, actively telling people not to use us. And @AnthropicAI takes 0 responsibility despite several escalations.”

In some conversations, Claude eventually walked it back when challenged. It admitted PlanetScale is “alive and well” and even mentioned the new Postgres pricing. But the correction never carries over to the next chat. The model keeps mixing up the old free-tier cutoff with a total company shutdown.

Lambert dismissed the usual knowledge-cutoff excuse. He pointed out that Anthropic spends well over $100 million on marketing, yet the model still confidently serves up wrong facts about the current world.

This isn’t the first recent headache involving Claude. Earlier today, we covered how the model has been blocking security researchers from certain vulnerability tasks. Before this controversy, Anthropic had been dealing with outrage over its usage limits for weeks, with its latest acknowledgment drawing even more backlash.

That said, Anthropic has not commented publicly on the complaints. The false shutdown claims keep appearing with no visible change for now.

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