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Comment by paozac | Hacker News Reader

This might actually make Anthropic very popular among those who do not support the current US presidency, a significant market share.

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For the last couple of months all the top models have been from the US. I don't expect that to last - or even if it does the gap will gradually diminish to the point that "top" is largely irrelevant outside of marketing.

But at the moment I must use a US model for the best results for complex queries. So I'm glad that there's one company I'm at least somewhat ok with supporting. I'm not even that picky. All I want is a reasonable guarantee that I'm not supporting a company who's tools are used for autonomous drone warfare in American wars, and a few other basic things like that.

I guess someone might feel moved to respond to this by pointing out all the other companies outside of AI that I should be avoiding too. Please do! I'm actively trying to be more mindful of the companies I support rather than just chasing the lowest bills. I'm in the process of migrating my company away from MS 365 to Nextcloud on Hetzner, which is going slow but well.

> For the last couple of months all the top models have been from the US

The commenter you responded said presidency not country. There are multiple parties and possibilities here.

Take notes other AI companies. This is a totally fine line to draw and it's not even that high bar.

Dont allow systems to be built with your AI that automate mass surveillance or automate kill decisions.

The disappointing this is someone _will_ do it, you know it’s going to happen.

Someone? You say it like it's unknown that OpenAI got the contract

I meant in the general sense - you could have all the major players take a moral stance and say “no” but someone would say yes eventually.

> Dont allow systems to be built with your AI

those systems will be built regardless. That type of boycott being asked from companies is essentially asking companies to not make profit where there's profit to be made, when those doing the asking is not also taking in any sacrifices for this boycott.

Instead of asking companies to be altruistic, those wanting such systems to be illegal should be using the civic system we have today to make it so - yes, this costs effort, resources and time. Like all hard things.

The thing is, other companies can pick up that slack. Heck even distillation attacks against claude can be used to create such models

With the price of tokens I think mass surveillance with AI is not a realistic use case.

There already is a mass surveillance. Presumably most electronic communication is monitored. I guess LLMs can likely do a somewhat better job but probably not worth the cost for the marginal benefit over existing technologies?

Similarly for "Terminators" or other AI killing machines... Isn't it cheaper to use a human? We have autonomous weapons already, like cruise missiles... Other than the movies what does a reality with LLMs pulling triggers look like? Cars are also "killing machines" and we're letting computers drive them...

Unfortunately if these things do start making sense for whatever reason they're probably going to happen. Private companies in general have no way to prevent their technology from being used for "defense" applications. Once that genie is out of the bottle it's not going back in.

> With the price of tokens I think mass surveillance with AI is not a realistic use case.

Congratulations, today you're one of the lucky 10,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...

My first thought here was that Anthropic just became the first call for Europe to discuss AI services and infrastructure.

I wonder if a US company has ever wholesale emigrated before?

Europe is not particularly anti surveillance

Actually the EU passed an AI act back in 2024 that tackles that.

Please note that mass surveillance of Europeans is fine from Anthropic's statement.

It's called political correctness. There is a longstanding undercurrent in American politics of treating Constitutional rights (aka natural rights) as only applicable to Americans [0]. Framing the issue in terms of lofty universal ideals would be politically suicidal. And with the current precarious situation, giving more energy to overly-simplistic jingoist chants is not what anybody needs.

[0] this seems to be a bit of proto-fascism that helped set the stage for the overt dynamic we've now got

Yeah it's a shitty statement "we're totally fine accidently targeting foreigners but come on, not 'mericans" because it's well known that once you have the capability it will be aimed at everyone anyway.

Folks; there isn't a geopolity agnostic equivalent of incorporation. There is no Anthropic without that grant of incorporation. Even if they wanted to take the most principled stance, they can only push so far, and to have a system that is incompatible with operating a mass surveillance network, it has to be capable of monitoring itself to recognize whether it has been configured in such a way as it's activity is aligned to the activity of mass surveillance. You'd have to build the mass surveillance oracle, which is in and of itself, a mass surveillance machine.

Claude Code seems to be the best at programming right now. I think if Anthropic can maintain or increase their lead they'll have no shortage of customers. I imagine Anthropic's business is driven by business customers rather than individual paying customers at this point.

It’s the best at everything. OpenAI models are dangerously stupid enough as it is. Not much can phase me these days, but a sycophantic ChatGPT in a kill chain is nightmare fuel.

Personally, I removed ChatGPT from my phone for Claude last week. This reenforces my choice.

Europe is a great market. To be fair, given Dario’s nationality, we should make a massive offer for Anthropic to relocate somewhere in Europe like San Marino or such. Levying taxes and letting them have all they need. (Joking, but to a point)

They got at least one more subscriber as of about twenty minutes ago since I just canceled my ChatGPT Pro subscription and moved to Anthropic.

Sam Altman immediately capitulating to the Trump administration after bragging like four hours ago about he wouldn't shows a distinct lack of integrity. It's not like ChatGPT is categorically better than Claude, I just didn't bother change to Claude before purely out of my previous inertia with ChatGPT.

Does Anthropic make money yet, or like a lot of AI are they selling dollars for fifty cents each? Can they keep going without a lot of investment from administration-aligned oligarchs like the Saudis, or without these circular stock-for-compute deals?

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