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Comment by ammo1662 | Hacker News Reader

This is not a technical issue or a matter of service agreements.

They totally knew that this would never be accepted by users, and that is precisely why they resorted to obfuscation and steganography to exfiltrate the data. This was quietly added in an update, and would have been removed in a later one had it gone unnoticed.

How is this any different from hiding a drug in food and randomly feeding it to a homeless person as a human trial? Even if that homeless person is an undocumented immigrant, does that make that acceptable?

They crossed the line.

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I mean, you’d resort to an obfuscated approach if you thought the ‘malicious’ users would remove your direct telemetry. The other users could be perfectly happy about it, but if you announced the change, obviously the malicious users would hear about it too and disable it.

This isn’t a comment on whether I agree with the change. Just that your analogies aren’t applicable here.

Anthropic always came off to me as what can shorthand be described as an abusive controlling partner + the resulting relationship.

If you start viewing the conversations around it through that lens, a lot of stuff intuitively clicks into place.

Including this apologism for example.

Why would they want to do that when it’s likely that someone will find out anyway and it could turn into a scandal?

One possibility: they wanted to keep it secret because they’re crooks.

Another possibility: there are so many calls that it costs a lot in operating expenses.

Remember when we mentioned that even just saying “hello” at the start of a chat costs extra money for no reason?

So if I create a mechanism on the client side that every transmission uses 4 bytes instead of 40… it is clever way how to spend less.

Of course, it doesn’t excuse them for not mentioning it anywhere… or for hiding it on page 385 of the terms of service… like when the Vogons told Earthlings that the notice about Transgalactic Highway was in the basement on Alpha Centauri :)

Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Things do not need to make sense. They often do not. They just appear just enough like they would so that it flies under the radar.

It's all just conway's law. It had to be like this. It cannot be any other way.

> Abusive controlling partners rarely are long-term timeframe rational, because being long-term timeframe rational is at odds with being an abusive controlling partner.

Humans are rarely “long-term timeframe rational” (rational choice theory is very much a known-false model of human behavior on both the individual and aggregate level), but there is nothing about abusively exploiting an initially trusting and eventually dependent telationship that it is inconsistent with long-term rationality.

I can't really parse this comment, but I also have a feeling that nothing is lost in struggling with that.

Seems like the people talking about AI safety and alignment don't want to stop at just harnessing their AIs. They also want to keep themselves safe from competition and make sure only users aligned with their business and political agenda gets to access their products.

The same people are boasting about being the future of work and is schmoozing with politicians to draft regulations, by the way.

> The other users could be perfectly happy about it

this could be true about a miracle drug that is untested too. still, human rights laws dictate that humans be allowed to opt in to such trials. so you must at least shift your argument to "users opted in to all of anthropic's bullshit, explicit or otherwise, when they opt to install and run claude code."

> randomly feeding it to a homeless person as a human trial

Would you be shocked if some of the current tech bro companies could with finding such subjects?

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