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This seems reasonable at first glance, but imagine applying it to other development tools — "You can't use Xcode/Visual Studio/IntelliJ to build a commercial IDE", "You can't use ICC/MSVC to build a commercial C/C++ compiler", etc.

In this case it’s “You can’t use our technology to teach your thinking machine from our stealing of other people’s work, because our AI is just learning stuff, not stealing, and you are stealing from us, because we say so.”

When it comes to AI stealing all IP in the world, I really don't give a crap.

What I do give a crap about is the AI companies being little bitches when you politely pilfer what they have already snatched. Their hypocrisy is unlimited.

yes

but also the prohibition goes way further as it's not limited to training competing LLMs but also for programming any of the plumbing etc. around it ....

LOL, that's so much worse than I imagined.

I know we want to turn everything into a rental economy aka the financialization of everything, but this is just super silly.

I hope we're 2-3 years away, at most, from fully open source and open weights models that can run on hardware you can buy with $2000 and that can complete most things Opus 4.5 can do today, even if slower or that needs a bit more handholding.

OpenAI, a while back said their was no moat. You'll see these AI companies panic more desperately as they all realize it's true.

That's different, though. If 20 other companies can host these models, you still have to trust them. The end result should be cheap hardware that's good enough to large a solid, mature LLM that can code comparably to a fast junior dev.

A more interim way to put it is "The current moat is hardware".

> hardware you can buy with $2000

Including how much RAM?

I assume strongly, in 3 years the prices will have dropped a lot again.

Because of increased supply or reduced demand?

Rather increased supply I assume.

Only a few memory suppliers remain, after years of competition, and they have intentionally reduced NAND wafer supply to achieve record profits and stock prices, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46467946

In theory, China could catch up on memory manufacturing and break the OMEC oligopoly, but they could also pursue high profits and stock prices, if they accept global shrinkage of PC and mobile device supply chains (e.g. Xiaomi pivoted to EVs), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482777#46483079

AI-enabled wearables (watch, glass, headphones, pen, pendant) seek to replace mobile phones for a subset of consumer computing. Under normal circumstances, that would be unlikely. But high memory prices may make wearables and ambient computing more "competitive" with personal computing.

One way to outlast siege tactics would be for "old" personal computers to become more valuable than "new" non-personal gadgets, so that ambient computers never achieve mass consumer scale, or the price deflation that powered PC and mobile revolutions.

> This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

I am not a lawyer, regardless of the list of examples below(I have been told examples in contracts and TOS are a mixed bag for enforceability), this text says that if anthropic decides to make a product like yours you have to stop using Claude for that product.

That is a pretty powerful argument against depending heavily on or solely on Claude.

It may or may not be enforceable in the court of law, but they'll definitely ban you if they notice you...

And I'm pretty sure ban evasion can become an issue in the court of law, even if the original TOS may not hold up

The part I quoted:

> This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

Is more strict than the examples. The examples are what I think may not be enforceable.

So for example:

> What is NOT prohibited: > - General ML/AI development for your own applications (computer vision, recommendation systems, fraud detection, etc.) > - Using Claude as a coding assistant for ML projects

If you use Claude for "General ML/AI development for your own applications..." and Anthropic puts out a specific product for "General ML/AI development for your own applications..." you probably can not use Claude for "General ML/AI development for your own applications..." and have to use the new specific product instead. Well as long as the example is not enforceable.

The first quote looks enforceable and if I want to be on the same side I have to assume it takes precedence over the example.