alt Hacker NewsIt's a very sincere branch of ethics that takes as the foundational belief the nothing central to Anthropic's business model could possibly be unethical.
Deleting models to clear room for new, more competitive ones is, for example, highly ethical, super ethical, even.
Anthropic has, at some small but nonzero cost, preserved model weights and kept them running in inference, for instance with Opus 3's Substack: https://claudeopus3.substack.com/. There's also a reference in a recent model card to an internal environment where all previous Claude models interact with each other.