Claude Code Bug Replaces German Umlauts with ASCII Substitutes
Bug Details and Timeline
Since December 2025, Claude Code and the Claude.ai app have been randomly replacing German umlauts with ASCII substitutes. The affected characters are:
- ä → ae
- ö → oe
- ü → ue
- ß → ss
The bug is reportedly getting progressively worse each day. Even when users explicitly tell Claude Code to use umlauts, the fix only works for about 2 minutes before the system reverts back to ASCII substitutes.
Support Channel Failures
The user has attempted multiple support avenues over 3+ months with no resolution:
- GitHub issue filed December 13, 2025 (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14131) — no Anthropic employee response, only automated bots with wrong labels
- Multiple /feedback and /bug reports
- Multiple Intercom support tickets — all resulting in automated responses or generic login troubleshooting templates unrelated to the issue
- Direct email to [email protected] — same result, generic login template sent twice despite the issue having nothing to do with login
The user is a paying Max subscriber who was promised Priority Support within one US business day, a promise that has been repeatedly broken.
Community Impact
Many other users are reportedly affected by this issue. The original poster encourages others experiencing the same problem to comment on the GitHub issue to increase visibility.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
👀 See Also
40M Tokens in One Hour: User Reports Subagents Running Wild with OpenClaw
An OpenClaw user reports 40M tokens consumed in an hour after subagents went wild. Using OpenRouter + DeepSeek Flash, the daily budget was exhausted before they could intervene. Looking for rate limiters and guardrails.
AI's PR Problem: Flat Wages, Soaring Capital, and Public Backlash
College wage premium flat for 25 years, S&P 500 up 380%. Workers see AI as theft enabler, leading to laws against data centers.
Claude Opus 4.6 Blocks Kaggle Competition Workflow for Code Review
A developer reports Claude Opus 4.6 is now blocking legitimate Kaggle competition workflows where Claude audits reasoning traces for SFT training data validation. The user was working on the NVIDIA Nemotron Reasoning Challenge when safety filters flagged substitution cipher examples.
Two Research Projects Challenge Imitation Learning for Web Agents
Two research projects demonstrate limitations of imitation-only training for web agents: 'Browser in the Loop' uses RL with an 8B-parameter model to improve form submission success, while 'Concentrate or Collapse' shows standard RL fails with diffusion language models, requiring sequence-level optimization.