alt Hacker Newsnot really. Here's their own product clarifying:
Based on the terms, Section 3, subsection 2 prohibits using Claude/Anthropic's Services:
"To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services."
Clarification:
This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.
What IS prohibited:
- Using Claude to develop a competing AI assistant or chatbot service
- Training models that would directly compete with Claude's capabilities
- Building a product that would be a substitute for Anthropic's services
What is NOT prohibited:
- General ML/AI development for your own applications (computer vision, recommendation systems, fraud detection, etc.)
- Using Claude as a coding assistant for ML projects
- Training domain-specific models for your business needs
- Research and educational ML work
- Any ML development that doesn't create a competing AI service
In short: I can absolutely help you develop and train ML models for legitimate use cases. The restriction only applies if you're trying to build something that would compete directly with Claude/Anthropic's core business.
Replies
> This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.
I am not a lawyer, regardless of the list of examples below(I have been told examples in contracts and TOS are a mixed bag for enforceability), this text says that if anthropic decides to make a product like yours you have to stop using Claude for that product.
That is a pretty powerful argument against depending heavily on or solely on Claude.
LOL, that's so much worse than I imagined.
I know we want to turn everything into a rental economy aka the financialization of everything, but this is just super silly.
I hope we're 2-3 years away, at most, from fully open source and open weights models that can run on hardware you can buy with $2000 and that can complete most things Opus 4.5 can do today, even if slower or that needs a bit more handholding.
This seems reasonable at first glance, but imagine applying it to other development tools — "You can't use Xcode/Visual Studio/IntelliJ to build a commercial IDE", "You can't use ICC/MSVC to build a commercial C/C++ compiler", etc.