alt Hacker NewsClaude Is a Space to Think
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I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.
It appears they trend in the right direction:
- Have not kissed the Ring.
- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).
- Committing to no ads.
- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]
The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])
It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.
I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...
[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...
Besides the editorial control -which openai openly flagged to want to remain unbiased- there is a deeper issue with ads-based revenue models in AI: that of margins. If you want ads to cover compute & make margins -looking at roughly $50 ARPU at mature FB/GOOG level- you have two levers: sell more advertisement, or offer dumber models.
This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn), they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and went with claude.
This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!) with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects against businesses optimizing for intelligence.
I appreciate taking a stance, even if nobody is asking. It would be great if it was less of a bad faith effort.
It's great that Anthropic is targeting the businesses of the world. It's a little insincere to than declare "no ads", as if that decision would obviously be the same if the bulk of their (not paying) users.
There are, as far as ads go, perfectly fine opportunities to do them in a limited way for limited things within chatbots. I don't know who they think they are helping by highlighting how to do it poorly.
What makes Anthropic seem like early Apple is not just the unique taste, but the courage to stand firm with their vision of what the product should be.
I always found Anthropic to be trying hard to signal as one of the "good guys".
I wonder how they can get away without showing Ads when ChatGPT has to be doing it. Will the enterprise business be that profitable that Ads are not required?
Maybe OpenAI is going for something different - democratising access to vast majority of the people. Remember that ChatGPT is what people know about and what people use the free version of. Who's to say that making Ads by doing this but also prodiding more access is the wrong choice?
Also, Claude holds nothing against ChatGPT in search. From my previous experiences, ChatGPT is just way better at deep searches through the internet than Claude.
Important to note Anthropic has next to no consumer usage
What other interaction models exist for Claude given that Anthropic seems to be stressing so much that this is for "conversations"?
(Props for them for doing this, don't know how this is long-term sustainable for them though ... especially given they want to IPO and there will be huge revenue/margin pressures)
I think this says a lot about the business approach of Anthopic compared to OpenAI. Just the vast amount of free messages you get from OpenAI is crazy that turning a profit with that seems impossible. Anthropic is growing more slowly but it seems like they are not running a crazy deficit. They do not need to put ads or porn in their chatbot
> Anthropic is focused on businesses, developers, and helping our users flourish. Our business model is straightforward: we generate revenue through enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, and we reinvest that revenue into improving Claude for our users. This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions.
Very diplomatic of them to say "we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions" while also taking a dig at OpenAI on their youtube channel
That's true. CI in all of my conversations with AIThat's true. In all my conversations with AI, I think CIaude's thinking is the richest.
So apparently they're going to run a Super Bowl ad about ChatGPT having ads (without saying ChatGPT of course)........ Has doing an ad that focuses only on something about your competitor ever been the best play? Talk about yourself.
Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?
Ads playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...
This will be an amusing post to revisit in the internet archives when or if they do introduce ads in the future but dressed up in a different presentation and naming. Ultimately the investors will come calling.