alt Hacker NewsCall me a cynic, but I don't believe this is a genuine change of heart at all. It feels much more like a panicked response to something that might undermine their IPO.
Even if you trust Anthropic today (which I don't), they clearly don't want competition and there's no telling what other shady moves they'll pull in future.
The only sustainable way forward is to support open models. I was already on the fence about whether or not to keep my Max subscription (the extra cost over something like DeepSeek V4 didn't really feel justifiable). This is the tipping point for me, I'll be cancelling my sub before it renews at the end of the month.
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I think they are legitimately convinced that this model is so dangerous it could destroy the world and that they genuinely have the responsibility to prevent it from assisting other models to destroy the world.
I don't think I agree that I should be forbidden from e.g. patching a binary to work on the latest macOS since the company behind it died and intentionally installed a time-based kill-switch (FUCK ADOBE for popularizing that practice). But ooOOooOOoo working with machine code is so cybersecurity and therefore suspicious.
I guess I don't understand why it's shady. It seems more like a poorly executed decision to enforce a publicly stated policy (it's been against Anthropic's ToS to use their models on frontier ML research for a while now). After all, people found out about this through their published system card.
It is definitely a bad idea to do this without notifying the user, because users who are incorrectly affected will have no way of providing feedback or getting support. And it is also anticompetitive, but if you truly believe that AI is not a normal technology, it is rational.