Being the 'good guy' is just marketing. It's like a unique selling point for them. Even their name alludes to it. They will only keep it up as long as it benefits them. Just look at the comments from their CEO about taking Saudi money.

Not that I've got some sort of hate for Anthropic. Claude has been my tool of choice for a while, but I trust them about as much as I trust OpenAI.

I am on the opposite side of what you are thinking.

- Blocking access to others (cursor, openai, opencode)

- Asking to regulate hardware chips more, so that they don't get good competition from Chinese labs

- partnerships with palantir, DoD as if it wasn't obvious how these organizations use technology and for what purposes.

at this scale, I don't think there are good companies. My hope is on open models, and only labs doing good in that front are Chinese labs.

They are the most anti-opensource AI Weights company on the planet, they don't want to do it and don't want anyone else to do it. They just hide behind safety and alignment blanket saying no models are safe outside of theirs, they wont even release their decommissioned models. Its just money play - Companies don't have ethics , the policies change based on money and who runs it - look at google - their mantra once was Don't be Evil.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-o...

Also codex cli, Gemini cli is open source - Claude code will never be - it’s their moat even though 100% written by ai as the creator says it never will be . Their model is you can use ours be it model or Claude code but don’t ever try to replicate it.

Given that LLMs essentially stole business models from public (and not!) works the ideal state is they all die in favor of something we can run locally.

They work with the US military.

When powerful people, companies, and other organizations like governments do a whole lot of very good and very bad things, figuring out whether this rounds to “more good than bad” or “more bad than good” is kind of a fraught question. I think Anthropic is still in the “more good than bad” range, but it doesn’t make sense to think about it along the lines of heros versus villains. They’ve done things that I put in the “seems bad” column, and will likely do more. Also more good things, too.

They’re moving towards becoming load-bearing infrastructure and then answering specific questions about what you should do about it become rather situational.

Their move of disallowing alternative clients to use a Claude Code subscription pissed me off immensely. I triggered a discussion about it yesterday[0]. It’s the opposite of the openness that led software to where it is today. I’m usually not so bothered about such things, but this is existential for us engineers. We need to scrutinise this behaviour from AI companies extra hard or we’re going to experience unprecedented enshittification. Imagine a world where you’ve lost your software freedoms and have no ability to fight back because Anthropic’s customers are pumping out 20x as many features as you.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873708

I think I’m not allowed to say what I think should happen to anyone who works with Palantir.

> I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

I’m very pleased they exist and have this mindset and are also so good at what they do. I have a Max subscription - my most expensive subscription by a wide margin - and don’t resent the price at all. I am earnestly and perhaps naively hoping they can avoid enshittification. A business model where I am not the product gives me hope.

I don’t know about “good guys” but the fact that they seem to be highly focused on coding rather than general purpose chat bot (hard to overcome chatGPT mindshare there) they have a customer base that is more willing to pay for usage and therefore are less likely to need to add an ad revenue stream. So yes so far I would say they are on stronger ground than the others.