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I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive. It appears they trend in the right direction: - Have not kissed th

• skybrian 8mo ago
  When powerful people, companies, and other organizations like governments do a whole lot of very good and very bad things, figuring out whether this rounds to “more good than bad” or “more bad than good” is kind of a fraught question. I think Anthropic is still in the “more good than bad” range, but it doesn’t make sense to think about it along the lines of heros versus villains. They’ve done things that I put in the “seems bad” column, and will likely do more. Also more good things, too. They’re moving towards becoming load-bearing infrastructure and then answering specific questions about what you should do about it become rather situational.
• marxisttemp 8mo ago
  I think I’m not allowed to say what I think should happen to anyone who works with Palantir.
  • fragmede 8mo ago
    Maybe you could use an LLM to clean up what you want to say
• mrdependable 8mo ago
  Being the 'good guy' is just marketing. It's like a unique selling point for them. Even their name alludes to it. They will only keep it up as long as it benefits them. Just look at the comments from their CEO about taking Saudi money. Not that I've got some sort of hate for Anthropic. Claude has been my tool of choice for a while, but I trust them about as much as I trust OpenAI.
  • libraryofbabel 8mo ago
    I mean, yes and. Companies may do things for broadly marketing reasons, but that can have positive consequences for users and companies can make committed decisions that don't just optimize for short term benefits like revenue or share price. For example, Apple's commitment to user privacy is "just marketing" in a sense, but it does benefit users and they do sacrifice sources of revenue for it and even get into conflicts with governments over the issue. And company execs can hold strong principles and act to push companies in a certain direction because of them, although they are always acting within a set of constraints and conflicting incentives in the corporate environment and maybe not able to impose their direction as far as they would like. Anthropic's CEO in particular seems unusually thoughtful and principled by the standards of tech companies, although of course as you say even he may be pushed to take money from unsavory sources. Basically it's complicated. 'Good guys' and 'bad guys' are for Marvel movies. We live in a messy world and nobody is pure and independent once they are enmeshed within a corporate structure (or really, any strong social structure). I think we all know this, I'm not saying you don't! But it's useful to spell it out. And I agree with you that we shouldn't really trust any corporations. Incentives shift. Leadership changes. Companies get acquired. Look out for yourself and try not to tie yourself too closely to anyone's product or ecosystem if it's not open source.
    • bigyabai 8mo ago
      > and even get into conflicts with governments over the issue. To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in both Apple and most governments' best interests to appear like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the San Bernardino kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated of suspicion. I don't think this is a moral failing of anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for that. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
• cedws 8mo ago
  Their move of disallowing alternative clients to use a Claude Code subscription pissed me off immensely. I triggered a discussion about it yesterday[0]. It’s the opposite of the openness that led software to where it is today. I’m usually not so bothered about such things, but this is existential for us engineers. We need to scrutinise this behaviour from AI companies extra hard or we’re going to experience unprecedented enshittification. Imagine a world where you’ve lost your software freedoms and have no ability to fight back because Anthropic’s customers are pumping out 20x as many features as you. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873708
  • 2001zhaozhao 8mo ago
    Anthropic's move of disallowing opencode is quite offputting to me because there really isn't a way to interpret it as anything other than a walled-garden move that abuses their market position to deliberately lock in users. Opencode ought to have similar usage patterns to Claude Code, being a very similar software (if anything Opencode would use fewer tokens as it doesn't have some fancy features from Claude Code like plan files and background agents). Any subscription usage pattern "abuses" that you can do with Opencode can also be done by running Claude Code automatically from the CLI. Therefore restricting Opencode wouldn't really save Anthropic money as it would just move problem users from automatically calling Opencode to automatically calling CC. The move seems to purely be one to restrict subscribers from using competing tools and enforce a vertically-integrated ecosystem. In fact, their competitor OpenAI has already realized that Opencode is not really dissimilar from other coding agents, which is why they are comfortable officially supporting Opencode with their subscription in the first place. Since Codex is already open-source and people can hack it however they want, there's no real downside for OpenAI to support other coding agents (other than lock-in). The users enter through a different platform, use the service reasonably (spending a similar amount of tokens as they would with Codex), and OpenAI makes profit from these users as well as PR brownie points for supporting an open ecosystem. In my mind being in control of the tools I use is a big feature when choosing an AI subscription and ecosystem to invest into. By restricting Opencode, Anthropic has managed to turn me off from their product offerings significantly, and they've managed to do so even though I was not even using Opencode. I don't care about losing access to a tool I'm not using, but I do care about what Anthropic signals with this move. Even if it isn't the intention to lock us in and then enshittify the product later, they are certainly acting like it. The thing is, I am usually a vote-with-my-wallet person who would support Anthropic for its values even if they fall behind significantly compared to competitors. Now, unless they reverse course on banning open-source AI tools, I will probably revert to simply choosing whichever AI company is ahead at any given point. I don't know whether Anthropic knows that they are pissing off their most loyal fanbase of conscientious consumers a lot with these moves. Sure, we care about AI ethics and safety, but we also care about being treated well as consumers.
• adriand 8mo ago
  > I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic? I’m very pleased they exist and have this mindset and are also so good at what they do. I have a Max subscription - my most expensive subscription by a wide margin - and don’t resent the price at all. I am earnestly and perhaps naively hoping they can avoid enshittification. A business model where I am not the product gives me hope.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• insane_dreamer 8mo ago
  I don’t know about “good guys” but the fact that they seem to be highly focused on coding rather than general purpose chat bot (hard to overcome chatGPT mindshare there) they have a customer base that is more willing to pay for usage and therefore are less likely to need to add an ad revenue stream. So yes so far I would say they are on stronger ground than the others.
• Jayakumark 8mo ago
  They are the most anti-opensource AI Weights company on the planet, they don't want to do it and don't want anyone else to do it. They just hide behind safety and alignment blanket saying no models are safe outside of theirs, they wont even release their decommissioned models. Its just money play - Companies don't have ethics , the policies change based on money and who runs it - look at google - their mantra once was Don't be Evil. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-ostp-u-s-ai-action-plan https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-o... Also codex cli, Gemini cli is open source - Claude code will never be - it’s their moat even though 100% written by ai as the creator says it never will be . Their model is you can use ours be it model or Claude code but don’t ever try to replicate it.
  • Epitaque 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • heavyset_go 7mo ago
      Think of the harm that bad actors could cause with access to high school chemistry and physics textbooks
    • 10xDev 8mo ago
      "please do all the work to argue my position so I don't have to".
      • Epitaque 8mo ago
        I wouldn't mind doing my best steelman of the open source AI if he responds (seriously, id try). Also, your comment is a bit presumptuous. I think society has been way too accepting of relying on services behind an online API, and it usually does not benefit the consumer. I just think it's really dumb that people argue passionately about open weight LLMs without even mentioning the risks.
        • Jayakumark 8mo ago
• threetonesun 8mo ago
  Given that LLMs essentially stole business models from public (and not!) works the ideal state is they all die in favor of something we can run locally.
  • mirekrusin 8mo ago
    Anthropic settled with authors of stolen work for $1.5b, this case is closed, isn't it?
    • riku_iki 8mo ago
      Its not approved yet I think.
    • yuiasdfj 7mo ago
      [dead]
• drawfloat 8mo ago
  They work with the US military.
  • mhb 8mo ago
    Defending the US. So?
    • cess11 8mo ago
      That's pretty bad.
      • mhb 8mo ago
        Sweden too. So there's that.
        • cess11 7mo ago
          What do you mean?
          • mhb 7mo ago
            I mean that it's one thing to think it's bad to be defending the US. And it's another thing to think it's bad for the US to be defending the place you live.
            • cess11 7mo ago
              It doesn't. US presence where I live, make it a target.
              • mhb 7mo ago
                M'okay. Cops are evil, military is evil. Looks bleak.
                • 7mo ago
• throwaw12 8mo ago
  I am on the opposite side of what you are thinking. - Blocking access to others (cursor, openai, opencode) - Asking to regulate hardware chips more, so that they don't get good competition from Chinese labs - partnerships with palantir, DoD as if it wasn't obvious how these organizations use technology and for what purposes. at this scale, I don't think there are good companies. My hope is on open models, and only labs doing good in that front are Chinese labs.
  • derac 8mo ago
    I agree, they seem to be following the Apple playbook. Make a closed off platform and present yourself as morally superior.
  • esbranson 8mo ago
    > Blocking access > Asking to regulate hardware chips more > partnerships with [the military-industrial complex] > only labs doing good in that front are Chinese labs That last one is a doozy.
  • mym1990 8mo ago
    The problem is that "good" companies cannot succeed in a landscape filled with morally bad ones, when you are in a time of low morality being rewarded. Competing in a rigged market by trying to be 100% morally and ethically right ends up in not competing at all. So companies have to pick and choose the hills they fight on. If you take a look at how people are voting with their dollars by paying for these tools...being a "good" company doesn't seem to factor much into it on aggregate.
    • throwaw12 8mo ago
      exactly. you cant compete morally when cheating, doing illegal things and supporting bad guys are norm. Hence, I hope open models will win in the long term. Similar to Oracle vs Postgres, or some closed source obscure caching vs Redis. One day I hope we will have very good SOTA open models where closed models compete to catch up (not saying Oracle is playing a catch up with Pg).
  • 8mo ago
• Zambyte 8mo ago
  They are the only AI company more closed than OpenAI, which is quite a feat. Any "commitment" they make should only be interpreted as marketing until they rectify this. The only "good guys" in AI are the ones developing inference engines that let you run models on your own hardware. Any individual model has some problems, but by making models fungible and fully under the users control (access to weights) it becomes a possible positive force for the user.
• falloutx 8mo ago
  >I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive. There are no good guys, Anthropic is one of the worst of the AI companies. Their CEO is continuously threatening all of the white collar workers, they have engineering playing the 100x engineer game on Xitter. They work with Palantir and support ICE. If anything, chinese companies are ethically better at this point.
  • delaminator 7mo ago
    Even in CNN polling the majority of US citizens support ICE. Perhaps your moral bubble is not universal.
    • selfhoster11 7mo ago
      Murder is immoral. That much is certain. ICE murders people.
      • delaminator 7mo ago
        No one's been murdered. And those polls were after the protesters trying to kill police were shot in self-defense.
    • deleted 7mo ago
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    • Defenestresque 7mo ago
      I apologize for resurrecting a fairly old thread (I originally came across it via Googling the Claude Ad announcement), and this has nothing to do with the main post anyway but my desire not to further derail things is butting up against my pigheadedness as famously exemplified in xkcd.com/386 You wrote "the majority of US citizens support ICE", later specifying it was after the controversial killings. I want to fact-check your claim, because if I came here from Google I think others may too and so far there has been no pushback on this apart from "no, they don't support ICE" which is problematic. The Navigator Research poll is probably the most interesting in terms of actually visualizing the data [5], it used to be at the bottom but I moved this section to the top. It's an excellent visualization, my eye was especially drawn to the incredibly stark divide between the MAGA-Republicans vs. non-MAGA Republicans. I've never seen it in such contrast and I wonder how that will play out. Regardless, that's outside of the topic of this comment, wich is already too long. The poll (n=~1,000) conducted around the five following days states that among all those polled, the Net Favorable rating, asked as: Please indicate how favorable or unfavorable you are to: ICE, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. was: June 30 '25 - 8 Dec 8 '25 -14 Jan 12 '26 -20 Feb 1 '26 -22 As an added curio, among Democrats it shifted -12 points, but among Republicans it shifted -17 points. Make of that what you will. A poll released on February 5th and conducted January 27th-30th (n=1,462) by Marist University's MaristPoll organization states [1]: 62% of Americans say the actions of ICE are making Americans somewhat less safe or much less safe. 37% think the actions of ICE are making Americans much more safe or somewhat more safe The following information is from Pages 14-16 of the PDF [2]. The specific question was: Do you approve or disapprove of the job Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing? 33% Approve 60% Disapprove 7% Unsure The poll is extremely along the party lines in some respects (e.g. only 2% of the people who answered 'Approve' voted for Kamala in 2024), but I feel like that's to be expected. At the same time, while people who approve of ICE definitely didn't vote for Kamala, people who voted for Trump are not extremely strong supporters, with 24% of 2024 Trump voters answering either Disapprove or Unsure (18% and 6% respectively). Some other interesting correlations are that while recent ICE actions are generally very unpopular among Democrats and somewhat popular among Republicans, the usual rural/urban differences which are usually much better predictors for how someone will vote, far ahead of correlations with education, race or income. In this case "approve" difference between Big city (31%) and Rural (43%) was only 12 points. Interestingly, the approval rating almost follows a reverse bell curve (?) in terms of population density: Big city 31% Small city 31% Suburban 28% Small town 40% Rural 43% Again, apologies for the digression, I figured maybe someone can make some sense of those numbers. Another question: How would you describe the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in enforcing immigration laws? Do you think they have: 65% Gone too far 12% Not gone far enough 22% Or are their actions about right 1% Vol: unsure This can be summarized in a bunch of different ways, but it's not dishonest to say that 2/3rds of Americans think that ICE has "gone too far", which heavily contradicts your statement. Everything after this is kind of just because I felt three is the minimum number of sources to thoroughly dismiss your assertion. Here are the results from June, 2025 for the exact same question, with the change in percentage from June, 2025 to January, 2026 in brackets. 54% Gone too far [+11%] 18% Not gone far enough [-06%] 26% Or are their actions about right [-04%] 1% Vol: Unsure Ipsos released a poll [3] on January 27th, conducted between January 23rd-25th (n=1,139) with a self-reported margin of error of +/- 3.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Immigration-related outtakes: Only 10% of those polled picked "Immigration" as their selection to a 17-option question that asked "In your opinion, what is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?" By comparison, 15% picked the "Economy, unemployment and jobs", 12% picked "Political violence and extremism" and 16% picked "Threats to democratic values and norms" (Page 1) Overall, do you think efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deal with unauthorized immigration in the country... (Page 10) Go too far 58% Do not go far enough 12% Are about right 26% Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling the following issues? Immigration (Page 3) Strongly approve 26% Somewhat approve 14% Somewhat disapprove 10% Strongly disapprove 43% Generally speaking, would you say the following things are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track? Immigration policy (Page 5) Right direction 35% Wrong track 51% Don’t know 11% P.S. I don't claim this comment to be unbiased, I clearly "cherry-picked" certain facts, but they were not out of context nor did I massage the numbers, the reason I phrased it this way was because it was a direct rebuttal to the claim that most Americans support ICE [even after the shootings]. [1] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/ https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-febru... [2] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR_PBS-News_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables_202602021147.pdf https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR... [3] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-say-federal-immigration-enforcement-efforts-go-too-far https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-say-federal-i... [4] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2026-01/Reuters%20Ipsos%20Jan%20Core%20Political%20Topline%20for%20Release_0.pdf https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... [5] https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Navigator-Update-02.04.2026.pdf https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Nav...
• b3ing 7mo ago
  Too late for that, they came out and said they will train on anything you type in there months ago
• deaux 7mo ago
  They're 16% owned by Google and Amazon, so they're already a minimum of 16% "bad guys".
• raincole 8mo ago
  Google was the 'good guy.' Until it isn't. Hell, OpenAI was the good guy.
  • JumpinJack_Cash 7mo ago
    I can't see how Google turned to become evil or how OpenAI did for that matter. Google delivered on their promise, and OpenAI well it's too soon but it's looking good. The name OpenAI and its structure is a relic from a world where the sentiment was to be heavily preoccupied and concerned by the potential accidental release of an AGI. Now that it's time for products the name and the structure are no longer serving the goal
• agluszak 8mo ago
  In Poland, before the last presidential election, a member of one candidate’s campaign team had a moment of accidental honesty. Asked whether his candidate would pledge not to raise taxes after winning, he replied: “Well, what’s the harm in promising?”
• nilkn 8mo ago
  Anthropic was founded by OpenAI defectors who said OpenAI's product strategy was too dangerous and needed more safety research. But in reality Anthropic has almost exactly the same product strategy. A lot of this is just marketing to raise money to make the founders billionaires rather than the multi-millionaires they only would've been if they hadn't founded a competitor.
  • astrange 7mo ago
    Anthropic hasn't released image or video generation models. Seems pretty different to me. Claude is somewhat sycophantic but nowhere near 4o levels. (or even Gemini 3 levels)
    • deleted 7mo ago
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• yuiasdfj 7mo ago
  [dead]
• easterncalculus 7mo ago
  > Committing to no ads. No one who believes this should be in any position of authority in the AI space. Anthropic's marketing BS has basically been taken as fact on this website since they started and it's just so tiring to watch this industry fall for the same nonsense over and over and over again. Anthropic is younger. That's why they're not doing ads. As soon as they actually reach the spending to (not) reach their AGI goals they will start running ads and begging the taxpayer for even more money.
• rowyourboat 7mo ago
  Remember when OpenAI was about not-for-profit AI development for the betterment of humanity?
• romanovcode 7mo ago
  > - Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1] > The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3] Dude, you cannot put these two sentences together. The defense department was either a fluke or a PR stunt. If they partner with Palintir they absolutely do not care that their tech is going to be used for killing and other horrible deeds. A company with morals (which does not exist BTW) would never partner with Palintir.
• 4d4m 7mo ago
  On not having kissed the ring - the board appointments and nat sec appointments indicate to me this is not true, thoughts?
• hackernews90210 7mo ago
  I am not sure, if it will turn out to be. I always find the CEO using hype and fear as his marketing strategy. A year ago, he came out and said, "Blood-bath" for white collar jobs. It seems to create some sense of anxiety in the receiving end.