Comment by biffles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by biffles | Hacker News Reader

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I applaud the engineers that work at Anthropic, who have created both amazing products and uniquely intelligent models -- but I really shake my head at some of their business decisions and public comms which have done a lot to damage their trustworthiness in the business and developer community.

In just the past month: they decided to silently downgrade (instead of simply refusing) responses related to machine learning and other 'competitive' topics [1]. Then, they were caught fingerprinting certain request environments in a hidden way [2]. And now, once Fable is re-released after much frustration among its customers, they are providing it for a shorter period than promised (mostly over a major holiday period), with more stringent safety classifiers and a 50% haircut to usage limits.

It's hard to not view the organization as bizarrely adversarial to its customers. I was incredibly supportive of Anthropic during the supply chain debacle, as I viewed it as the capricious actions of a corrupt admin. But now I am wondering if it was just a response to the ineptness of their business leaders.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467896 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

> It's hard to not view the organization as bizarrely adversarial to its customers. I was incredibly supportive of Anthropic during the supply chain debacle, as I viewed it as the capricious actions of a corrupt admin. But now I am wondering if it was just a response to the ineptness of their business leaders.

From the start Anthropic have been hostile to its own customers, and also trained on pirated books and had to settle north of $1.5B avoiding a $100B+ worth of damages if found liable.

Then they attempted and are still pursing against powerful open weight models by asking governments for regulatory changes that effectively ban the release of them - because it undermines their own moat (lol) and business model.

Now not only they were caught silently fingerprinting their customers requests, they are now placing ID verification for using their own powerful models, which could apply to everyone else for using powerful LLMs.

There just is no point in defending this company at all. Anthropic are NOT your friends.

I do think most of the "adversarial to their own customers" things are coming from a company in extreme compute crunch. Eg, if they stop abuse they have more compute to serve real customers. And some of it is coming from them being true believers that AI could be a risk to society when it gets smart enough (their talk about jobs is because they want society to prepare, because they think it will change jobs regardless of whether they make it or others).

Note that other providers are also training on the same copyright books.

I don't think anyone realistically thinks open weights can be banned, though it does raise interesting questions if the White House is going to keep banning models like Fable and GPT5.6 while open weights equivalents are floating around. Their reasoning seemed to be that they don't want foreign adversaries to have access to models that can find security issues, but a local ban on an open model wouldn't stop that.

What trillion dollar company do you feel like is your friend?

There are none.

This is exceedingly easy to explain: demand is way too high, and the pro/max plans are loss leaders. I've paid a total of $20 and in 10 days, my cost, according to Claude code's cost tracker is like $400, which actually doesn't include all the use I've done.

Which is to say, if I continue my current usage over the month, I'll be getting $1000 of Claude for $20. It's difficult to be mad at someone selling me a $20 for two quarters, even if they're putting a bunch of restrictions on how and when I can do that.

I'm with you there. The way they treat their customers is high-handed and disdainful.

I'm gradually moving to GLM 5.2 on Opencode. It's the barest fraction of the price, and it's surprisingly capable. I notice very little difference vs. Opus 4.8.

There are awful models, and there are models nobody use, to paraphrase. Anthropic’s revenue skyrocketed earlier this year, according to their IPO filing. There has simply been too much demand. That’s the growing pain that everyone love to have, other than the affected users of course. That was why they paid a premium for all of the computing they could get from SpaceX, Amazon, Google.

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