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davedxtoday at 7:15 AM2 repliesview on HN

Could this be legally construed as anti-competitive behavior?

Edit: I asked Claude. It replied:

> Consumer protection / deceptive practices. In the EU this would be a clear UCPD (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive) issue and potentially a DSA violation. In the US, FTC Act §5 prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts." Selling a product that secretly performs worse than advertised for a commercially self-serving reason, without disclosure, is textbook deception. The Samsung/Apple battery throttling cases are instructive here: Apple faced regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions specifically because users weren't told.

> Competition law. This is where "anti-competitive" gets complicated. Refusing to help competitors build competing products via your ToS is generally legal — you can decide who you license to. But covertly sabotaging output quality for a class of users while charging them full price crosses into different territory. Under EU competition law (Article 102 TFEU), if a company with dominant market position uses covert technical means to disadvantage competitors, that's closer to abusive conduct than a legitimate ToS restriction.


Replies

anon373839today at 9:39 AM

Anthropic’s behavior reeks of insecurity. Imagine Google taking elaborate measures to prevent you from searching about search engine development!

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greenrdtoday at 8:36 AM

I think either you've prompted Claude misleadingly, or it's interpreting the law unnecessarily prissily (which is a failure mode I've noticed LLMs falling into).

This clearly is disclosed, otherwise how did we get to know about it?

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