Comment by luke-stanley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luke-stanley | Hacker News Reader

"OpenAI was plugging Claude into its own internal tools using special developer access (APIs)"

Unless it's actually some internal Claude API which OpenAI were using with an OpenAI benchmarking tool, this sounds like a hyped-up way for Wired to phrase it.

Almost like: `Woah man, OpenAI HACKED Claude's own AI mainframe until Sonnet slammed down the firewall man!` ;D Seriously though, why phrase API use of Claude as "special developer access"?

I suppose that it's reasonable to disagree on what is reasonable for safety benchmarking, e.g: where you draw a line and say, "hey, that's stealing" vs "they were able to find safety weak spots in their model". I wonder what the best labs are like at efficiently hunting for weak areas!

Funnily enough I think Anthropic have banned a lot of people from their API, myself included - and all I did was see if it could read a letter I got, and they never responded to my query to sort it out! But what does it matter if people can just use OpenRouter?

I agree, it does sound like they're hyping it up. But maybe the author was confused. In the API ecosystem, there are special APIs that some customers get access to that the normal riff-raff do not. If someone called those "special developer access" I don't think it'd be wrong

Yeah that's possible! Would love more details if true.

Yeah, Anthropic are morons.

They banned my account completely for violation of ToS and never responded to my query, following my 3 or 4 chats with Claude where i asked for music and sci-fi books recommendations.

Never violated ToS, account created through they ui, used literally few times.

Well, I don't use them at all except for very rare tests through open router indeed.

I'm not sure this is a useful data point or how it makes them morons?

Agreed, not sure it makes them morons. The way their website scraper works is what makes me think they're morons. I opted to honeypot them in iocaine, because their access rate is absurd. On a typical day on my small website, they'll make nearly 550k calls, so averaging just above 6rps. Almost everyone else I honeypotted barely pushes 1 rps. Almost everything I see from Anthropic gives me the impression they're self-entitled jerks.

Anthropic are wicked smart, it's not fair to call them morons, BUT the ToS ban of subscribed, myself, and OpenAI might be useful data points suggesting Anthropic's API moderation behaviour can be strict. Anthropic are doing great work overall, but they have erred on the side of policy robustness, versus keeping API users happy. I said more in my sibling comment reply.

Well I don't think Anthropic are morons, that's not the point I was making.

Yes, I'm frustrated with Anthropic killing my direct API account for silly reasons, with no response. But actually I really appreciate Anthropic's models for code, their deep safety research with Constitutional AI, interpretability studies etc.

They are certainly guilty of having scaling and customer service issues, and making the wrong call with a faulty moderation system (for you too, and many others it seems like)!

But a lot of serious AI safety research that could literally save all our skin is being done by Anthropic, some of the best.

On OpenAI's API Platform, I am on Tier 5! It's unfortunate Anthropic have acted less commercially savvy than OpenAI (at the time, at least). I have complained on HN and I think on Twitter before about my account to no avail, after emailing before. But yeah, usually I just use them via OpenRouter these days, it's a shame that I must use it for API access.

I get the impression that a lot of OpenAI researchers went to Anthropic, which essentially is the first OpenAI splinter group. I think this is a sign of a serious, more healthy intellectual culture. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next.

I’ve unfortunately had the same thing happen to me and am trying to run the gauntlet of getting a response.

Even more annoying is that I suspect its an issue linked to Google SSO and IP configurations.

I’m personally a big fan of Anthropic taking a more conservative approach compared to other tech companies that insist it’s not their responsibility - this is just a natural follow on where we get a lot of false positives.

Having said that desparate for my account to be unbanned so I can use it again!

> Seriously though, why phrase API use of Claude as "special developer access"?

Isn't that precisely what an API is? Normal users do not use the API. Other programs written by developers use it to access Claude from their app. That's like asking why is an SDK phrased as a special kit for developers to build software that works with something they wish to integrate into their app

Because it's not "special developer access". It's just "normal developer access". The phrasing gives an impression they accessed something other users cannot.

It would be normal standard English to assume that special modifies the word access. That would make the sentence semantically be the same as “special access, specifically the type of access used by developers”

Compare with a sentence like “the elevator has special firefighter buttons” which does not mean that only some special type of firefighter uses the button.

Counter-point: as a wordsmith, it's incumbent on the article's author to make their point in an unambiguous way. In your example, rather than write "the elevator has special firefighter buttons", the author could choose to write "the elevator has buttons which are only available to firefighters". Or alternatively, "the elevator has buttons which are only available to certain firefighters".

The amount of care the author puts into their phrasing determines whether their point comes across as intended, or not. The average magazine reader can likely figure out that there's no such thing as "special" firefighters with "privileged" access to elevator buttons that other firefighters lack. They may not have the programming knowledge to do likewise with "developer access", even if they are reading a magazine like "Wired".

It's Newswriting 101-level stuff.-

In your example, "firefighter buttons" is a noun phrase which refers to a particular type of button. "Special" applies to the whole of "firefighter buttons," not just to "firefighter" and not just to "buttons." The same would apply for "special developer access."

So it isn't normal developer access, like an API, there's something special about it that most developers with access to the API could not access.

> the elevator has special firefighter buttons

If you said that to anyone they'd assume there are non standard buttons beyond the normal "call" / "fire" buttons. Special changes the meaning in both sentences.

Firefighter buttons are meant to only be used in very rare special occasions (emergencies) so "special" is just emphasis, whereas developer access is a completely normal way to use the product and thus "special" suggests additional significance. Sure not everyone uses the product as developers, but then not everyone uses the 18th floor button either.

Developer access isn’t normal to a lay audience. That’s my point. To a lay audience developers are special computer expert people who do completely different things than they do.

From the perspective of a non technical reader developer access isn’t normal, it’s special.

The HN audience doesn’t see that. But the phrase isn’t confusing to normal people.

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if someone bothers to say "special developer access" rather than just " developer access", there must be some difference between the two. There's clearly not any reason that " developer access" wouldn't be sufficient to describe using APIs though, so it's hard not to read the word "special" as being at least redundant if not actively misleading.

In content intended for an audience of developers, it's reasonable to assume "special developer access" means access for special developers. If the audience is the general public, it would be sensible to interpret it as "special access for developers," in contrast to the normal sort of access most other people use.

Yeah and Wired could just write it in a clear way so that no disambiguation or head scratching is needed.

If Wired wants to portray normal access to Anthropic's API platform as a special fringe activity, rather than a normal way to programmatically use AI, it really says something about Wired. And this is Hacker News, right? Should we be on some watch list or something for thinking having control via API access is normal dev access!? MCP isn't even that old yet! ;D It's possible to write clearly and not that hard, I'm pretty sure they are hyping.

> If Wired wants to portray normal access to Anthropic's API platform as a special fringe activity, rather than a normal way to programmatically use AI,

I know people on HN might mot understand this, but programmatically using anything is a special fringe activity, even if the manner of programmatic use is normal for such use.

If I'm an OpenAI employee, and I use Claude Code via the API, I'm not doing some hacker-fu, I'm just using a tool a company released for the purpose they released it.

I understand that they were technically "using it to train models", which, given OpenAI's stance, I don't have much sympathy for, but it's not some "special developer hackery" that this is making it sound like.

Normal users use the API constantly, they just don’t realize it.

Isn’t half the schtick of LLMs making software development available for the layman?

>That's like asking why is an SDK phrased as a special kit

It's Software Developer Kit, not Special Developer Kit ;-)

Most people reading Wired probably don't know what an API is.

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