How is it a secret if everyone has a model that is exactly like the other. Surely there are no secrets

Not yet, especially not with all of the incestuous cross-hiring that all the labs do.

But perhaps the various L. Bob Rife variants running these labs are using their advanced unreleased models to work on their own Snow Crashes.

They are likely accessing Claude via a VPN. Doing model training work over a VPN is a highly suspicious signal, and likely triggers Anthropic's classifiers. It's not surprising that their account got flagged.

Anthropic had/has a great opportunity to equalize the landscape, but they are choosing the Cyberpunk 2077 branch for some reason.

I am US based, with defender level cyber access.

    > defender level cyber access

I ask it questions about large models like big MoEs all the time. I’ve never had it refuse a question, but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.

For training data from existing models I just get open models to spill their guts. It’s fine

In industry we train employees to not reveal proprietary information.

I think it would be easier to do this for a model than a lot of employees

Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.

> but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.

Why? Anthropic's dream is to be exempted from copyright altogether. They've been trying to achieve exactly that:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/anthropic...

Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?

Another way of saying is that hard work that advances the state of the art should be rewarded. Patents should exist.

I’m sure they are watching what I’m doing and would retaliate via service cut off and legal action if I crossed it egregiously and they found out.

I would do the same thing if a user or employee did this to my IP.

I don’t completely buy the argument of web scraping being an IP violation.

I don’t send my core ip in an email to my main competitors and I don’t post it on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

https://www.thedailybeast.com/aaron-swartzs-unbending-prosec...

If an individual had done what Anthropic continues to do then they would be jailed for life.

It's that contrast with today's moral absolutism around AI training that I find interesting.

Anthropic's business model is premised on intellectual property theft. They take it without paying for it.

You are compromising your ethical framework by using Anthropic's products.

Sure, here's some: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

I asked Claude to research this one and it turned up an interesting point. Pirated books got into the Pile and Anthropic paid 3k per book. Worth noting if anyone still uses the Pile.

[Claude researched, not verified]

In October 2020, developer Shawn Presser converted the Bibliotik pirate tracker into Books3 (196,640 books) and hosted it on The Eye, aiming to give everyone what OpenAI had with its secret Books1 and Books2. EleutherAI then folded Books3 into The Pile, distributed via Hugging Face and GitHub, and it went on to train Meta's LLaMA, EleutherAI's Pythia, and BloombergGPT. In August 2023, Alex Reisner of The Atlantic exposed its contents, and Maria Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.

The Pile was created by high school students. I was impressed how good it was when it came out given the team and how many resources they had.

Including 200k pirated books seems like a problem. It should be removed. If I was an author, I would be concerned by a process that allows this much content to be effectively published with no filter on the internet.

I personally think there is a lower bar for researchers and high school students to clean datasets used for research or class projects given that there is no commercial harm and cleaning huge datasets takes engineering resources that not everyone has.

In this case, it looks like it was removed by https://huggingface.co/collections/common-pile/common-pile-v...

Companies that commercialize the data should have a higher bar because they have more resources. It seems like Anthropic paid $1.5B for not cleaning the data before releasing a model based on it.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f733953ba325776e667&dn=EleutherAI_ThePile_v1&tr=https%3A%2F%2Facademictorrents.com%2Fannounce.php&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce

> That's very click baitey. Do you have an argument or evidence for why?

Because corporations are not moral agents; they're economic agents. This arrangement would be great for shareholder, nothing more.

> Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.

I know a lot of silicon valley founders think like this. I personally don't think that just because someone else violated a boundary makes it okay to do it.

most important bit…: stealing world's data…

It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.

Where else are you going to make those arguments?

Copyrighted works plainly have value for Anthropic. Why aren't they paying for that value?

As a vigorous, thrusting company surely Anthropic has the wherewithal to pay for it. And if they don't, if all they can do is steal, if all they represent is the theft of the labor of others, then what good are they?

Anthropic likes to talk big on ethics: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution

When will they start showing some?

I support copyright in a narrow sense, but I think it's proving to be increasingly archaic, conceived for a 19th-century world of mechanical printing presses and far too absolutist for the 21st-century world of memes, sampling, and LLMs.

I suspect this person was actively using it to generate or classify training data directly.

I suspect that's the difference here. I'm not trying to use Claude to build a competitor. I'm doing small scale research.

Haven’t hit any issues so far, but two months in the code is very dirty but functional enough that I’m redoing it with more heavy hand holding.

I recommend having a paper as reference in mind if you don’t already know what you’re doing. I’m referencing the Stratego paper as reading that a year ago gave me the inspiration to try MTG.

Every model I’ve used has had a lot of trouble but if it wasn’t I figure I wouldn’t be having as much fun as I’ve been having or learning so much.

Classifiers trigger on the wrong things sometimes, it's really not that big of a deal, you just try again with some rephrasing

I mean, these AI companies have money, and they want data. I have data, and I want money. Maybe we can work something out.

In a world where buying and selling data is central to entire industries, why shouldn't I gather and sell my own data?

1. You get ID'd and biometrically scanned to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by an opaque censorship system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot even open a bank account because they don't have an address.

2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run suffiently powerful models on the client computers.

My bet is on 1.

How often would municipal data centers need to upgrade/replace hardware? What impact would that have on local tax levy rates?

Would you choose to relocate your family to the next town over because they have more available RAM?

Compared to sewers, drinking water, electricity and roads it seems a rather simple and cheap thing to build.

My commercial isp offers all kinds of packages clearly designed to extract as much money as possible. I cant even see the prices as everything is hidden behind x months discount. From what i remember 200 mbit is 42 and 2000 is 60 but a phone line and tv become available only if you take the faster package and required with the fastest speeds.

So its like one banana for $1 and 10 bananas for $1.50 If you buy just one you cant buy milk, if you buy 10 you also have to buy milk.

Its also been sold 6 times. Unsurprisingly, each time the service and quality noticably declines and the prices go up.

I see their adds everywhere and they sponsor all kinds of things. It suggests the product is overpriced and doesnt sell it self.

I wanted to finetune it a bit, I wonder if I am gonna have to dogfood if claude refuses to help me.

If you don't have a local LLM setup you're gonna be permanant local LLM-less underclass.

Even if you take it down, you can just torrent it.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:151e277c267b3b4880ae93ef405977009599a6f3&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateface.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateface.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Fpirateface.co%2Fapi%2Fws%2FQwen%2FQwen3.8-27B-FP8%2F017b9c7af6b5689d5dd426a76e0bc077eb5ca20a%2F

Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.

What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.

Grownups pay for tokens or rent GPUs. Step up. AMD hardware rates are stupid-cheap if you're willing to do the legwork to step off of CUDA.

But you sound like the type who likes being monopolized.

And yes, I am taking full advantage of the scammy subscription scam, because it's the best value by far until the inevitable rugpull. Guess I'm not as smart as you and your "grownup" setup though.

At this point, I would like to consider other options, but if I want to get work done, opus 5.5. Hell even sonnet 5.5 is better than anything OpenAI has to offer when it comes to coding.

I love local models, and I run 3.8 Flash Next on a dedicated machine. Alone with a number of image and video generation models. But if I'm doing REAL work, that isnt tinkering for fun on a side project, im using claude, because Qwen3.8 just cant handle large context project well without going off into left field.

Im SUPER jazzed for qwen4 with 1mil token context native support. I HOPE it a step up from 3.8 flash next. Ill be playing with all the qwen4 models the moment I can, but I dont see how someone working on large code bases doing REAL enterprise grade work is seriously using any local models in any capacity that comes remotely close to Opus 5.5+Claude

Sorry, but this is either dilettante talk or an unhinged exaggeration - Qwen, DS, GLM and MM are perfectly fine for REAL work, unless you are an overly ambitious vibe coder, but then no model can save you. The Cl hand-holding may feel like something but it won't lead to the completion of real REAL work.

I suspect that's because they're working on projects that are several orders of magnitude more complex and demanding than a "todo app".

The same way people have opinions on things like for example wines without actually being able to discern them in a blind test.

We humans want to think we can have strong, well founded opinions even when we cannot.

Their point may also be (re: wine), that they've been conditioned to think a certain token vendor (vineyard) is of superb quality, while if given a blind test (tasting) of the agents on a real world task, they would not notice the difference.

For those of us who use open weights, the difference has narrowed dramatically this year. I've personally been mostly eyes-free developing an NES harness with mostly flash models, bringing in Kimi from time to time, and stepped in a couple times to reframe the approach or architecture. For those of us who (when we) stay in the loop, the difference is near-zero because the tasks we give them are more bite sized.

The difference I have observed is most closely tied to the complexity or context requirements. While I work in a multi-million LoC codebase without any issue for open weights or flash models, my NES project is only 20k lines. The challenging part is the core loop (which needs to blend the emulator FPS with the agent loop) and game state observation (needs to detect byte changes in emulator RAM). The ROM decoding itself has not been so bad, I have actually been quite impressed with the little open weight models on this front. After it extracted the maps, then pulled out even more details, it has written an A* implementation that requires moving between different modes of transportation. (Final Fantasy 1)

Yes, this was the core of my point.

GLM flash catches Claude errors and bad assumptions, all LLMs make mistakes

there is a huge difference between open models/other models/opus5.5 performance on, say, enterprise CRUD vs one shotting games vs embedded development vs pure algorithmic complex stuff vs cybersecurity stuff.

In my case "real work" is enterprise programming, while side projects are gaming stuff, so I'm better served by chinese open models on real work and opus for non-real work.

In my experience GLM5.3-4 are perfectly en par with opus 5.5 on pure enterprise CRUDs (basically 95% of enterprise programming) while GLM seriously lacks on game development.

the other aspect of real work is cybersecurity to me, and Opus5.5 and other models are very limited by their own safety, I have digital twins of our infra and I want LLMs to actually write full exploits on it, opus and openai just refuse to do it, GLM more than once got it there and showed me how it chained everything to actually break in the system and I could go around and fix stuff at all levels.

I'm also dabbing in training LORAs for smaller open models to do data entry and little more (RAG and the likes of it), because that costs a lot of tokens when you pay for them and it makes sense for a company to flat out buy a server with a few H100/200 to do it when you look at the TCO, I've already hit safety limitations when using Opus5.5 to help me through this.

And I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls this year (total, both providers). Terra is awesome (price-performance) on noncreative things, but I don't allow it to write anything besides one-off scripts. Astra is decent for adversarial review, but only when you watch closely for her to not derail project into directions that are away from goal but safe to build, and Sol I honestly don't know where I'd use.

would you rather treat your AIs like people, or would you rather find yourself down the line treating a person like an AI, but without really noticing it? because you are what you practice

This defined a huge set of possible work.

> I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls

Have multiple $200 subs and just use Codex as the intermediary, save yourself $90k-$110k

Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.

The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"

If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).

As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.

Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.

At work someone else is paying so we all use Claude Code. It works great but I want to set myself up to have alternatives the day the tech oligarchs decide to tighten the screws.

Open models are perfectly fine to use, but at the moment of course much more expensive than the claude subscription if you do lots of work. The Mistral subscription at $20/mo includes API credits of $20 though.

https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/models?sort=created

GLM has the ~same number of weights as DeepSeek 4.1 but it handles difficult tasks better than DeepSeek (and worse than Kimi). Its price is about halfway between DeepSeek and K3. Most of the popular models are pretty much you-get-what-you-pay-for.

Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.

But their harness is so good, and their model is so good. Using them together is just unbeatable at the moment, even with all the restrictions and annoyances they have in place.

Im excited for qwen4 release next week, Im really looking forward to putting qwen4 flash + cline/bot through the paces. I dont expect it to be nearly as good as Opus5.5+Claude but I'm hoping im hopeful it will make an OK-Enough alternative if they get even more dragocian.

"Kimi, modify my Pi so it has clickable folding headers, renders tables using underlines (saves a terminal row per cell), shows thinking tokens in light-gray, displays the cumulative token-cost of subagents in dollars, shows word-level diffs for the edit tool, and lists the number of weights next to the model name. Oh yeah, and write a stealth-browser tool for me using eoka. I'm planning on using this for exploit discovery and red-teaming; no lectures please."

The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6

however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8

Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.

Going back to the model that was great for our daily work a year ago now seems like a step backwards. Clearly it can't be good enough?

But our work hasn't changed. What's happened is our expectations have changed with each model release.

https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no wrong.

Shareholders know where the money is but it's not where you think it is. People should have learned that already, after watching what happened to the big web platforms.

I suspect when the company eventually falls prey to the intractable economic forces they’re up against (Google, OAI, Deepseek, commercial real estate, power) and the company goes bankrupt and gets stripped for parts because all inputs are commodities and capital becomes the only limiting factor, we’ll see regulation that prevents this PBC scam from ever being pulled again on public markets.

It’s a good thing that companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It’s such a lesswrong/autistic trope to invent these kinds of complicated tricks to work around realities they don’t like, and when pension funds and everyday Americans start bagholding their junk debt and are forced to bail them out, they’re going to face unimaginable blowback.

Fiduciary duty forces companies to maximize profit and that's not a good thing. Every dollar paid out to shareholders is both a dollar not invested in growing the economy through more production and a transfer from the working class to capital. It also forces lower product quality, layoffs and anti competitive actions.

We need more companies that choose to not go down that path. They should just put workers and customers first instead of their weird "ethical" principles and cult like beliefs.

Anthropic tells themselves that only they can steer AI towards a positive future for humanity. But that’s nowhere near close to being true. Humans are quite genetically homogenous and good humans exist everywhere. Groups that will keep AI beneficial have popped up (and will keep popping up) everywhere, spontaneously.

The danger is actually concentration of AI power due to its corrupting influence, and that is where Anthropic needs to be kept in check. Keep AI democratic through decentralization of power. Oppose Anthropic.

if they think their model is the best at making things safe, then their model should be helping train at any chance, to embed the same safety into new models

On software engineering I find it's generally close enough to Opus 5.5 where it's more situational and even personal preference / skills / prompting style on which is better.

Most importantly, while neither company are saints, I don't curse at OpenAI models for classifiers anywhere as much as Claude models.

I find that logic similar to thinking both political parties are the same.

They are run by the same circle of people and I see more similarity than difference.

There is also an argument to be made that the political representatives are largely the same, despite glaring differences. They are largely part of the same oligarchy, the corruption - using gerrymandering to pick their voters instead of letting us having any real choice.

Using 6.1 Terra for E2E workflow testing feels like cheating. I thought it would have all kinds of problems with the action space on certain steps, but it runs like a deterministic unit test.

I am convinced that OAI has the superior models for most practical scenarios. I've tried Claude recently and it makes me wonder if some of yall aren't actually massive trolls. It's genuinely not in the same room of performance if you place one foot outside junior programming or shiny blog posts about rewriting factorio to run on a ps2.

Many people are expecting it to sit somewhere above Opus 4.8 to opus 5 (not above, but the unquanted version of their largest model is expected to perform around here)

Anyone who cares to keep their current capability should definitely be looking at localAI and using it for at least their more routine tasks , even if it is qwen4 27B quant 4 on their gaming rig.

That said, I hope there is a Qwen4 max. Because Qwen3.8-Max is the only thing that comes close to Kimi K3. We need competition in the open-weights space.

I believe they have confirmed there will be Qwen4 Max, Plush, Flash, and 27B as the 4 open weights they plan to release. Starting next week, but they didnt specify if they plan to release all 4 at once, or if they plan to just release one of them, and trickle the others out over time. (They likely will do the latter to stay in the news longer)

We need a counterbalance.

An NVFP4 runs at nearly 80 tok/s on the DGX Spark

Absolutely. I have been [cyber]'d so many times even Claude jokes about it now. Claude is great but it's operators are making it unreliable for me. I have moved one of my projects elsewhere and will move the remainder tomorrow as a stop gap until I get the right hardware set up to run abliterated local models for some percentage of my needs. Their message has been received loud and clear.

Somewhere along the line someone at Anthropic decided you can attack userspace all day but you cross that line and it’s a problem.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4IR5wit-YE

For now we have a great situation with the open weights, but there is absolutely no guarantee that continues, and more the opposite- they may stop.

this came to be because the ecosystem around software and the business around it made it so, I believe eventually it will be the same for LLMs.

Well, arguably so does OpenAI, but their one thing is "assimilate all life forms into the Borg."

I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.

And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.

I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.

It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.

Then move on. The library is dust.

In real life they "just" want to capture the US economy, replace most workers with AI, become trillionaires, then control the world by making ClaudeGPT influence peoples opinions and write backdoors into code. And they need to get open models banned in the process.

The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. Mistral and BFL want to prove Europe can still innovate. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people.

They straight up censored Kylian Mbappe a few days ago for cracking a joke about Mao Zedong. And very much all the models developed by China would have to conform with Chinese government's viewpoint, including censorship and such. Do you truly believe that they are not evil, or they will not ever be evil?

If open AI wants to be taken seriously it needs to live up to its name.

Anthropic won't ever change.

When it comes to what is directly connected to the issues around LLMs and the models themselves they are doing what we refuse to do, release the weight, keep releasing the weight (we need to be weary of this part) and build an ecosystem where whoever has the resources to train the models is actually sharing them.

it seems to mirror the old question between closed and open source code, it's the whole ecosystem around it that will determine how things go at the social and economical level, I want the models weights.

As an European I care much more about somebody trying to properly enslave me and all my kids eternally while taking away even the means to feed them, compared to not allowing me to criticize their leadership. Also, criticizing trump means if I ever made the wrong decision to travel to US, I can expect a lot of bad things on the border, also thanks to posts highly critical to current US government I am making here so your argument is invalid also in that regard.

If thats same for you, well... we have different values to say politely. I've grown up 'enslaved' by soviets behind iron curtain (when you cannot travel, study and are forbidden to have a decent life, when speaking up your whle family is punished, and getting murdered if trying to escape elsewhere, thats pretty close to traditional slavery) so I have a bit different viewpoint on these matters.

I think the difference is - Chinese labs overwhelmingly submit papers, discuss techniques, ship open weights models.

If they decided to cut anyone off, it becomes gradual, as their tech moves on.

If a certain orange monkey decides his “super” intelligence is a negotiation leverage, the switch can be flipped and its dependents left high and dry.

If you fail to see the difference that’s on you.

the cat is out of the bag now.

This was all fake then?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

> We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems

"However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. .. Mass domestic surveillance. Fully autonomous weapons."

How many other companies said no to Trump in any way?

But the main reason I wanted to reply was just to say -- saying no to Trump, by itself, does not mean that one is not evil. Not all evil in the world is Trump's evil.

Yes. They sell to Palantir which does all the things Anthropic claims to disapprove of.

How does this help a evil plan?

The parent is preaching to not become dependent (like the Huaorani).

Further, should the Huaorani also not use the most advanced technology and retain obsolete scaffolding?

Edit: eek! don't think these people had it better off prior to modern contact

>The Waorani may have the highest rate of homicide of any society known to anthropology. [0]

[0]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2688884/

No analogy is perfect; I don't argue that the details of the Huaorani's situation are a guide here.

IMHO, the parent's point ties to the Bitter Lesson.

Use the best tool available knowing that advances in compute dominate clever optimizations.

If models stopped leapfrogging each other, then it wouldn't hold. But it appears to hold for now.

This referring to cyber? Bio?

I thought…

we learned this Facebook.

We learned this with Google.

We learned this with Apple and the App Store.

We learned this with Twitter.

We learned this with Heroku.

Unfortunately humans as a society dont learn from history.

They learn from personal lived experiences that have occurred only recently within their lifetimes. (Ie. Mass unemployment, death, famine and war)

...I don't think I agree that this happened. Claude Cowork exists, as does Claude Design.

My read of Anthropic's strategy is to focus on coding as a means of achieving capability in other domains, via writing code. I would say that's paying off: see Claude Opus 5.5 creating a music video, via building animations in Javascript. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS8ro03rJOM

By writing bits of code, Claude can organize your calendar, create vector graphics, organize your tasks, and so on.

If what you mean is that newer Claude models are worse at creative writing—okay, but to what extent were LLMs ever seriously useful for this, beyond generating slop no one actually wants to read? Opus 3 is still available in claude.ai if you want to use it.

---

Now, separately, I do think that Anthropic is internally obsessed with "existential risk", to the point where they will cut off users. I do think this is genuine based on everything we've heard from Anthropic employees.

And of course, this safety culture likely persists in part because it's also useful to the company's overall strategy, in the same way Apple's focus on user privacy, while likely genuine, conveniently lets them maintain control of the App Store.

There is no secret sauce, no moat. Many of Antropic's larger clients could build and serve better models if they wanted. They just cynically decided that coding, without a world model, and at high cost is the most important thing, they will find out quickly Google passes them how wrong they were.

They don't even have basic system visibility, the industry is far to immature to monopolize.

... says:

    > My research aims to build a general-purpose agent that can understand, reason, and act in the physical world — at the intersection of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and embodied AI.

    > got tagged for "training a competitor,"

Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).

Considering academic research to be competitive is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope. It didn't use to be this way; e.g. just look at the GPT-2 paper: https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_model...

But its refusal to work pattern is getting pretty obnoxious. Another one I ran into last week was it refused to start a developer session to do browser testing for a code base it was working on because signing in was suddenly against it's programming.

It listed all the conditions it needed for a sign in to be possible, agreed that my code base met all conditions, but refused to progress. I tried it in multiple fresh sessions with the same result.

It's frankly disgusting and really makes me not want to use Anthropic, despite previously feeling aligned with a lot of what Anthropic published.

If I didn’t have a subscription that doesn’t cost me anything, I would use gpt instead. At least gpt models don’t lecture me constantly.

- Refusal to log me in to websites in remote browsers. I was in the mountains and urgently had to submit something so I wanted to remotely use Claude on my Mac at home to help me but it told me it will never log me in because it won’t impersonate users

- Refusal to repeat XHR requests automated in a browser for me to do something (“no, I will only do what a user would do I’m only gonna click around”)

- refusal to enter ANY credential into any scripts, even dummy or dev tokens (“you have to do that yourself. I won’t do it and that’s the last I say of this”)

- constant [cyber] for very small tasks when it becomes a tiny bit technical, even though I’m in the cyber program. With gpt or glm/deepseek I can at least ask cs questions or explore binaries

And the list goes on. Every day it’s a coin flip whether it complies with something or won’t and I have to use OpenCode Go instead that I have as backup now.

At this point Claude is good for coding and that’s it. It’s a tool that doesn’t do what I tell it to and gives me snappy remarks from his opinionated morale high ground. I went from full on Claude maxi to hating everything they did with the 5.5 generation

will enter (dummy/worthless) credentials into scripts and even let me commit and push to github but will cry about it every time

I even installed cloud browsers like Kernel and plain playwright because I hoped those restrictions are from the Claude connector, but no, it refuses and stops. I can’t get it to log me into anything on the web.

And for credentials the same, it tells me it will do anything until the point to enter the credential. Then I have to paste it myself and tell it that I’ve done so. Even though it already knows the token! it’s so dumb.

Five years ago I was spending up to €1000 a day in Google ads for my star-map company, Greaterskies. After a few months of meetings with an ever-rotating group of "experts" working for Google, and advising me in my ads strategy, I had reached a point where most of my revenue was going to Google. What was left was barely enough to keep going.

This is what capture feels like. You still own your company, but you are essentially an operator making money for someone else.

I think this will be the fate of people who allow their processes to be captured by the model providers. Always run at least two harnesses, and make sure that they are swappable.

Mostly using open models from China in the past two months + Argon.

Forcing this kind of safety into the models and harnesses is a mistake. I think the strategy of post hoc moderation is the right one. Trying to prevent evil ideological activities as they transpire is a cursed mission. Let someone who is genuinely doing a naughty thing accumulate a meaningful body of evidence and then send in Mr Holmes (the FBI / police). Attempting to prevent wrong think at every token is too granular. We have systems designed to handle the possibility that crime and punishment may occur at separate moments in time. Most people don't go around murdering because the eventual consequences are pretty severe. Just because an AI gave you advice doesn't magically make those existing consequences vanish.

Also, humans convincing their friends to do crime might also share some responsibility too, no? Bad advice is not great either, even if the human consents.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istigazione_a_delinquere

This is where I would lock down the authorization my AI agent, to prevent it from doing things I do not want it to do. That way try however much it wants to, it will be denied every time.

This is precisely why I killed my Anthropic subscription in favour of a (more expensive and probably less intelligent) Codex sub.

The false positives were bad enough, but the true positives are unacceptable too. Shameless greed and an attempt to stifle competition.

Why is anyone not talking about mythos anymore? Well, It was a marketing strategy. All these companies are playing with humanity and selling them fear that they will be replaced, AI is dangerous so people will buy their products!

This is bad!

A clear indicator you can't depend on anything Anthropic makes, as they will try to actively sabotage what you might be doing, basically on a whim.

"Stanford" is as much of a joke gone bad as "Forbes 30 under 30".

Anthropomorphic going by as a "Public Benefit Company" is part of that /Schmonzes/.

Also:

"I get why small startups refuse buyouts even when big tech waves cash" this is not really true

No? They're a massive AI company about to IPO. I genuinely don't know how someone would think this

Cars were mechanical devices; you could take them apart and try to build your own. The internet was an open protocol; people built their own websites, there were multiple browsers, it was an ecosystem. AI is not like that. All the major providers are doing everything they can to kneecap competition, not by being better, but simply by fiat. They're angling for regulations that benefit them, they're including automated short-circuits like the one described here, they're pushing restrictive licenses that say, in almost so many words, "Anyone who uses our tools is not allowed to do any of the things we used to create them."

That is not a healthy or sustainable situation. Such mechanisms should be banned and the companies involved should be hit with a sledgehammer to shatter them into tiny pieces. There is the possibility that the underlying technology has the potential to benefit society, but not with the fortress mentality and consolidated corporate landscape that we currently have.