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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Section 6.b of the Claude Code terms says they can and will change the product offering from time to time, and I imagine that means on a user segment basis rather than any implied guarantee that everyone gets the same thing.

b. Subscription content, features, and services. The content, features, and other services provided as part of your Subscription, and the duration of your Subscription, will be described in the order process. We may change or refresh the content, features, and other services from time to time, and we do not guarantee that any particular piece of content, feature, or other service will always be available through the Services.

It's also worth noting that section 3.3 explicitly disallows decompilation of the app.

To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law.

Always read the terms. :)

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> To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law.

Luckily, it doesn't seem like any service was reverse-engineered or decompiled here, only a software that lived on the authors disk.

Again, read the terms. Service has a specific meaning, and it isn't what you're assuming.

Don't assume things about legal docs. You will often be wrong. Get a lawyer if it's something important.

Thanks for the additional context, I'm not a user of CC anymore, and don't read legal documents for fun. Seems I made the right choice in the first place :)

Not "service" in human speech. Service, in bullshit legalese. They define their software as

> along with any associated apps, software, and websites (together, our “Services”)

As far as I understand, these terms actually hold up in court, too. Which is complete fucking nonsense that, I think, could only be the result of a technologically illiterate class making the decisions. Being penalised for trying to understand what software is doing on your machine is so wholly unreasonable that it should not be a valid contractual term.

See John Deere in the US, or Apple, or other fun companies.

I fully agree it’s nonsense, but it’s commonplace.

“ I dug into the Claude Code binary.”

Why should anyone care about their TOS while they are laundering people’s work at a massive scale?

There are a bunch of reasons.

Perhaps their TOS involves additional evils they are performing in the world, and it would be good to know about that.

Perhaps their TOS is restricting the US military from misusing the product and create unmonitored killbots.

Perhaps the person (as I do) does not feel that "laundering people's work at a massive scale" is unethical, any more than using human knowledge is unethical when those humans were allowed to spend decades reading copyrighted material in and out of school and most of what the human knows is derived from those materials and other conversations with people who didn't sign release forms before conversing.

Just because you think one thing is bad about someone doesn't mean no one should ever discuss any other topic about them.

Because by contrast they have the money and institutional capture to make your life miserable if you don't.

Bring it on, I say. Want shit publicity? Go for it assholes.

When a company tells you not to reverse, decompile, or disassemble their software, the first thing you should do is just that.

Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't.

^ this, I was about to double check on it when I saw you did. None of these practices sound abnormal, maybe a little sketchy but that comes with using llms.

So if I view source on their webpage I'm violating terms and conditions? Yikes.

I understand. Thank you for sharing. I didn't uncover all of this until Claude told me its specific system instructions when I asked it to conduct introspection. I'll revise the blog so that I don't encourage anybody else to do deeper introspection with the tool.

As a divergent thinker who is harmed when Claude behaves in unpredictable manners that go counter to my extensive harm prevention protocols, I may have, or may not have, done deep investigation of the tool in order to understand how to create my harm prevention protocols. When Anthropic employees push out unstable work, developers in general are significantly impacted. When unstable products end up in my workflow I am harmed both financially AND psychologically. I can lose hours, days, even weeks by an unstable model or IDE. I should not EVER be tested on. And if maybe diving into their product protects me, so be it.

We’re still on _Hacker_ News, right?

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