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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

most important bit…: stealing world's data…

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!

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

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

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

"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/.

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?

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

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.

Also:

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

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.

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

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.

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.

... 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).