alt Hacker NewsIt is very difficult to see this move as anything other than Anthropic pulling the ladder up behind itself. They can dress it up in "safety" all they want, I find it hard to interpret this in a charitable way.
This reminds me of how dark-pattern common wisdom in Web 1.0 website development was to ban external links. Then how social apps prevented the export of data and actively worked to nerf significant interoperability through APIs.
But this is a tool, not just a data moat. Like a knife that degrades your ability to create knives. Or like a text editor that prevents you from implementing a text editor.
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Only the priest is allowed into the sanctum is a rule that is as old as society. It is created for one reason but gets violated for another. The human mind is made of layers to handle predictions over different time horizons. Due to unpredictability in the universe contradictions between layers will keep arising. We make up stories to cope. So there is Control and there is Illusion of Control.
It's becoming extremely important to support open-source AI, especially legally. Anthropic is willing to go totalitarian this quickly; imagine how much worse they'd be willing to do with government-granted monopolies that ban open-source competition (like they've repeatedly pursued).
It's a little shocking and gruesome how quickly they're willing to tip their hand. They want to replace all software engineering with their own product, and then silently kill anyone making competing software. What other products will they launch in the future? Better hope you aren't in a space they want into: they'll cut your legs out from under you.
Oh, and training on your data from the internet? Ha ha. Terms of service apply to other people, not them. Parasites.
I think it's part of their marketing. Anthropic is not really ahead of other labs but these releases make it seem like they are reaching singularity
> It is very difficult to see this move as anything other than Anthropic pulling the ladder up behind itself.
It's worse than that, it also exempts from examination and competition some areas of science and technology while sterilizing others and emptying them from human participation. None of this is good for anyone except a very narrow circle of people.
Then, it creates a precedent where private entities decide who will be allowed access to what knowledge. Instead of government regulation, private corps will be "fighting crime" by dumbing down and spying on the people they don't like.
I don't think this Soylent Green strategy is a coincidence, it's been predicted and depicted, the social forces leading there are plainly visible to anyone capable of independent thought.
Open science can't come soon enough, unsubscribing is the best option until then.
It's the inevitable end game. If the models ever become practically useful in a closed loop, there's no other choice except to keep the model private and use it to compete directly with their current enterprise customers.
They believe they're going to eventually develop AI that's capable of recursive self improvement into world-redefining super-intelligence. I wouldn't expect someone in that position to risk giving away their lead. I expect we're going to see more of the top labs selectively holding back their best stuff.
It turns out the most dangerous thing is competition.
There is a rather specific irony in pulling up the ladder when your roof is on fire...
I don't see it as a ladder at all, unless you claim Anthropic built their own models by training off of other closed frontier models, violating those models' ToS
It's also hard to imagine them not doing this with any of the products they're building. "You can't use Claude to build an agent because that competes with Claude Code, you can't use Claude to build a design tool because that competes with Claude Design, you can't use Claude to build an email tool because that competes with Cowork."