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Comment by legendofbrando | Hacker News Reader

I would love to use their API but I can never get anyone to respond to me. It's like they have no real interest in being a developer platform. Has anyone gotten their vague application approved?

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I applied a few months ago. Last week I received an email:

“We’re pleased to let you know that we’re expanding access to the Claude API.

As the next step in considering your application, we’ll need some further information from you. Please fill out our onboarding form.”

The form seems to be the same form I filled in months before. I’ve not heard back in the 7 days since.

It is amazing to me that VCs are giving billions to these companies that have no idea how to launch or support products.

I would assume that the revenue story they are pitching to VCs is licensing the model to AWS, which has pre-existing infrastructure for distribution.

No way in hell I’m jumping through all those hoops to use a mediocre LLM. I was up and running with the OAI API in like 15 minutes.

Howdy, CISO of Anthropic here. I'm not sure what happened in your case but please reach out to support@ and mention my name; we'll respond ASAP.

I'm not at Anthropic but have met Jason. He's a good guy, not surprised that that he's here helping folks out

I am a subscriber, and personally I think it provides results closer to what I am looking for than gpt4.

That’s hard to believe but I’m open to the possibility.

Cam you share a few examples that might demonstrate this?

Not really at the moment. I was asking it to help write some professional (but boring) letters of interest that were academic in nature. I found the style of writing to be closer to where I wanted it..so a very subjective.opinion.

We got access soon after the API was announced and have happily been using Claude Instant in production for a couple of months now. It may have helped that our use case was a good match for their capabilities.

Could you use AWS Bedrock? It seems like they are going with the route of let AWS handle the developer platform aspect and they will just work on the models.

Yeah, I have been waiting for six months. And I have a real company with a real use case. I guess demand is off the charts.

Well, minutes after posting this, I got an invite.

I applied today; hopefully it will be a short wait. (and, hopefully, they won't hold my "I don't know what business I can build on this until after I try it" opinion against me)

Yeah, I find it interesting to read about their work, but it might as well be vaporware if I can't use the API as a developer. OpenAI has actual products I can pay for to do productive things.

Yes it was pretty easy even though it took like 2 weeks.

You just have to make it sound like you could maybe potentially spend money on them one day(instead of just being a curious nerd trying things out)

I’m mostly a curious dev but OpenAI hasn’t stopped me from learning and growing on their platform.

That may be because they have a lot more budget and the support of one of the largest cloud providers on earth. Offering free GPU compute to millions of people is really not an easy or cheap task.

Maybe... but not exactly what I meant in my case. I was commenting being able to get access at all, not my ability to pay. If Anthropic didn't have such a crazy application process I'd happily pay to use the API so I could learn more about it.

I just use it for tests and experiments, and it took about 1 week after I signed up for a test account.

Have heard similar things from friends, who were then able to get access via AWS

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