> [The model's authors] can do this kind of work with Claude, but if you or I try to do it, we will get blocked.

If this seems concerning, wait until the models get effective enough (gets work done properly at a lower energy need than humans have) that there's no reason for them to release anything. Why offer your weights for download or grant any third party usage access when you can just do the actual job yourself and collect all that turnover?

Maybe, but that's what the cyber program is for. Nobody knew if the seed was fine or a backdoor. If it was a backdoor, and Claude helped you find it as a normal person, Anthropic would get bad PR. If you're a verified security researcher, actually that's fantastic and Anthropic would get good PR and everybody claps.

Anthropic wants to IPO, they don't want another Fable shutdown situation.

To be clear I would prefer the cyber safeguards to be less restrictive, I think they're currently too much. I often go to open models because of it. But there are likelier reasons to restrict cyber than world domination.

Anthropic gets zero of my money because their favorite word is no. I cannot figure out how to as an individual or a small startup request elevated permissions for the purposes of anything that they think might potentially be dangerous for someone who is not me to access. I have a background in cybersecurity. I have a background in life sciences. Can I put those skills to use to benefit humanity? Who knows.

I feel like history is repeating itself - to many people AOL, Compuserve, MSN, et al seemed superior to "the web" in the early 1990s because they dumped money into making it slicker, licensed content, provided guardrails, made it easy for non-tech people... They had slick ads, were cultural phenoms, and people would take sides with the companies and think their arguments were strong and even obvious!

I worked on this specific task myself, using Claude, and I was not blocked (although I did not succeed!)

I'm skeptical that this particular task would get blocked, though I could be wrong. But I agree that the moat is a problem in the general case.

I know Anthropic models have a lot of insane, paranoid filters, but I don't remember them blocking cryptography work last I checked (some 3 months ago now).

> moat widening between the model providers, their government partners, and the public.

Part of me wonders whether the NSA/other TLA has either (a) an unrestricted model from a lab with less scruples like SpaceX, or (b) an in-house model, either abliterated or with data they've bought themselves.

Moat must have been written more times in the last 12 months than in all of history before that time.

Anyone can do this kind of work with a model as simple as GLM 5.3 or Kimi K3

Why would you be blocked? I cannot imagine why you would be for this specific task unless the supposed backdoor turned out to be real.

As much as I dislike the guardrails, they are absolutely irrelevant to this task, and you will not get blocked.

How do you know this to be true? I am not disagreeing; I genially need to understand why or if others are seeing blockers that I don't see or if I am seeing blockers that they do not see.

Are their guardrail benchmarks or anything of the sort that we can use to see where the bifurcation of permission/capability occurs?

Open models are just as quick to refuse to do stuff, in my experience.

Compute has always been gated. This is nothing new. If we look at the HPC space, many of the largest clusters were restricted access and used by governments organizations. Even the ones with "public" access, not just anyone could get access to it.

JFYI, this is not true. I do stuff like this all the time.

Whenever I say that the rich have access to much more capable and unrestricted models I get downvotes. Yet here we have another example.