Or… just that open-weights AI is getting good enough to present a reasonable level of threat to their business. So it popped up on a SWOT analysis and they’ve started putting a strategy together.
This doesn’t need to be anything more nefarious or untrustworthy than a company putting plans in place to deal with a competitive threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9#B...
Let's go back a step. You said Anthropic are "not trustworthy" and appeared to support this by saying "The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI". You then said they are doing "evil things".
I'm totally prepared to accept that any company --Anthropic or otherwise-- is doing evil things, but it takes a little more justification than someone saying so, or that "The CEO has recently started taking a stance against local AI".
But I do think that trying to create fear and uncertainty around open source in order to neutralize the competitive threat is potentially an evil (or at least not-morally-sound) strategy. I think it was pretty evil when Microsoft tried to do it against Linux.