Comment by JohnnyMarcone

I am a fairly cynical person. Anthropic could have made this statement at any time, but they chose to do it when OpenAI says they are going to start showing ads, so view it in that context. They are saying this to try to get people angry about ads to drop OpenAI and move to Anthropic. For them, not having ads supports their current objective.

When you accept the amount of investments that these companies have, you don't get to guide your company based on principles. Can you imagine someone in a boardroom saying, "Everyone, we can't do this. Sure it will make us a ton of money, but it's wrong!" Don't forget, OpenAI had a lot of public goodwill in the beginning as well. Whatever principles Dario Amodei has as an individual, I'm sure he can show us with his personal fortune.

Parsing it is all about intention. If someone drops coffee on your computer, should you be angry? It depends on if they did it on purpose, or it was an accident. When a company posts a statement that ads are incongruous to their mission, what is their intention behind the message?

Companies, not begin sentient, don't have values, only their leaders/employees do. The question then becomes "when are the humans free to implement their values in their work, and when aren't they". You need to inspecting ownership structure, size, corporate charter and so on, and realize that it varies with time and situation.

Anthropic being a PBC probably helps.

> How do you parse the difference between marketing and having values?

You don't. Companies want people to think they have values. But companies are not people. Companies exist to earn money.

> That hasn't happen with Anthropic for me.

Yet.

No company has values. Anthropic's resistance to the administration is only as strong as their incentive to resist, and that incentive is money. Their execs love the "Twitter vs Facebook" comparison that makes Sam Altman look so evil and gives them a relative halo effect. To an extent, Sam Altman revels in the evil persona that makes him appear like the Darth Vader of some amorphous emergent technology. Both are very profitable optics to their respective audiences.

If you lend any amount of real-world credence to the value of marketing, you're already giving the ad what it wants. This is (partially) why so many businesses pivoted to viral marketing and Twitter/X outreach that feels genuine, but requires only basic rhetorical comprehension to appease your audience. "Here at WhatsApp, we care deeply about human rights!" *audience loudly cheers*

The difference is if they are willingly ready to lose money on a personal level. If folks in the company are not willing to sacrifice their comp for good, they are not "good" guys.

For Anthropic and lot of startups with very high growth(even including OpenAI 4 years back or Google or Amazon), they don't have to lose anything to be good as they can just raise money. But when the growth stops that's when the test starts.

People have values, Corporations do not.

I believe in "too big to have values". No company that has grown beyond a certain size has ever had true values. Only shareholder wealth maximisation goals.

While there is nothing wrong about Saudi money, they are spreading FUD about open weights and wants to regulate and control how the LLM is used

> and even get into conflicts with governments over the issue.

To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in both Apple and most governments' best interests to appear like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the San Bernardino kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated of suspicion. I don't think this is a moral failing of anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for that.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

That's probably not true - government regulators require a lot of privacy work and Android certainly complies with that. Legal compliance is a large business strategy because small companies can't afford to do it.

Think of the harm that bad actors could cause with access to high school chemistry and physics textbooks

The steelman argument is that super-intelligent AGI could allow any random person to build destructive technology, so companies on the path toward creating that ought to be very careful about alignment, safety and, indeed, access to weights.

The obvious assumed premise of this argument is that Anthropic are actually on the path toward creating super-intelligent AGI. Many people, including myself, are skeptical of this. (In fact I would go farther - in my opinion, cosplaying as though their AI is so intelligent that it's dangerous has become a marketing campaign for Anthropic, and their rhetoric around this topic should usually be taken with a grain of salt.)

I would not consider myself an expert on LLMs, at least not compared to the people who actually create them at companies like Anthropic, but I can have a go at a steelman:

LLMs allow hostile actors to do wide-scale damage to society by significantly decreasing the marginal cost and increasing the ease of spreading misinformation, propaganda, and other fake content. While this was already possible before, it required creating large troll farms of real people, semi-specialized skills like photoshop, etc. I personally don't believe that AGI/ASI is possible through LLMs, but if you do that would magnify the potential damage tenfold.

Closed-weight LLMs can be controlled to prevent or at least reduce the harmful actions they are used for. Even if you don't trust Anthropic to do this alone, they are a large company beholden to the law and the government can audit their performance. A criminal or hostile nation state downloading an open weight LLM is not going to care about the law.

This would not be a particularly novel idea - a similar reality is already true of other products and services that can be used to do widespread harm. Google "Invention Secrecy Act".

"please do all the work to argue my position so I don't have to".

exactly. you cant compete morally when cheating, doing illegal things and supporting bad guys are norm. Hence, I hope open models will win in the long term.

Similar to Oracle vs Postgres, or some closed source obscure caching vs Redis. One day I hope we will have very good SOTA open models where closed models compete to catch up (not saying Oracle is playing a catch up with Pg).

I expect to some degree the Chinese models don't need immediate profits, because having them as a show of capability for the state is already a goal met? They're probably getting some support from the state at least.

> Even if you have no moral problems at all with the China authoritarian

It's funny how you framed your sentence. Let's unpack it.

1. I didn't say Chinese companies are good, I said my hope is on open models and only Chinese labs are doing good in that front

2. Chinese company doesn't immediately mean its about regime. Maybe its true in the US with the current admin, see how Meta, Google, Microsoft got immediately aligned with current admin

3. Even when company is associated with Chinese regime, I don't remember Chinese authoritarian regime kidnapping the head of another state, invading bunch of countries in the Middle East and supporting states committing genocide and ethnic cleansing (Israel in Gaza, UAE in Sudan and many more small militant groups across Africa and ME), and authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia.

If you ask me to rate them by evil level, I would give the US 80/100, and China 25/100 - no invasions, no kidnapping of head of states, no obvious terror acts - but unfortunate situation with Uyghurs.

Murder is immoral. That much is certain. ICE murders people.

I apologize for resurrecting a fairly old thread (I originally came across it via Googling the Claude Ad announcement), and this has nothing to do with the main post anyway but my desire not to further derail things is butting up against my pigheadedness as famously exemplified in xkcd.com/386

You wrote "the majority of US citizens support ICE", later specifying it was after the controversial killings. I want to fact-check your claim, because if I came here from Google I think others may too and so far there has been no pushback on this apart from "no, they don't support ICE" which is problematic.

The Navigator Research poll is probably the most interesting in terms of actually visualizing the data [5], it used to be at the bottom but I moved this section to the top. It's an excellent visualization, my eye was especially drawn to the incredibly stark divide between the MAGA-Republicans vs. non-MAGA Republicans. I've never seen it in such contrast and I wonder how that will play out. Regardless, that's outside of the topic of this comment, wich is already too long.

The poll (n=~1,000) conducted around the five following days states that among all those polled, the Net Favorable rating, asked as:

    Please indicate how favorable or unfavorable you are to: ICE, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

was:

    June 30 '25    - 8
    Dec   8 '25    -14
    Jan  12 '26    -20
    Feb   1 '26    -22

As an added curio, among Democrats it shifted -12 points, but among Republicans it shifted -17 points. Make of that what you will.

A poll released on February 5th and conducted January 27th-30th (n=1,462) by Marist University's MaristPoll organization states [1]:

    62% of Americans say the actions of ICE are making Americans somewhat less safe or much less safe. 37% think the actions of ICE are making Americans much more safe or somewhat more safe

The following information is from Pages 14-16 of the PDF [2]. The specific question was:

    Do you approve or disapprove of the job Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing?

    33% Approve
    60% Disapprove
     7% Unsure

The poll is extremely along the party lines in some respects (e.g. only 2% of the people who answered 'Approve' voted for Kamala in 2024), but I feel like that's to be expected. At the same time, while people who approve of ICE definitely didn't vote for Kamala, people who voted for Trump are not extremely strong supporters, with 24% of 2024 Trump voters answering either Disapprove or Unsure (18% and 6% respectively).

Some other interesting correlations are that while recent ICE actions are generally very unpopular among Democrats and somewhat popular among Republicans, the usual rural/urban differences which are usually much better predictors for how someone will vote, far ahead of correlations with education, race or income. In this case "approve" difference between Big city (31%) and Rural (43%) was only 12 points. Interestingly, the approval rating almost follows a reverse bell curve (?) in terms of population density:

    Big city   31%
    Small city 31%
    Suburban   28%
    Small town 40%
    Rural      43%

Again, apologies for the digression, I figured maybe someone can make some sense of those numbers. Another question:

    How would you describe the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in enforcing immigration laws? Do you think they have:

    65% Gone too far 
    12% Not gone far enough
    22% Or are their actions about right
     1% Vol: unsure

This can be summarized in a bunch of different ways, but it's not dishonest to say that 2/3rds of Americans think that ICE has "gone too far", which heavily contradicts your statement. Everything after this is kind of just because I felt three is the minimum number of sources to thoroughly dismiss your assertion.

Here are the results from June, 2025 for the exact same question, with the change in percentage from June, 2025 to January, 2026 in brackets.

    54% Gone too far                      [+11%]
    18% Not gone far enough               [-06%]
    26% Or are their actions about right  [-04%]
     1% Vol: Unsure

Ipsos released a poll [3] on January 27th, conducted between January 23rd-25th (n=1,139) with a self-reported margin of error of +/- 3.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Immigration-related outtakes:

Only 10% of those polled picked "Immigration" as their selection to a 17-option question that asked "In your opinion, what is the most important problem facing the U.S. today?" By comparison, 15% picked the "Economy, unemployment and jobs", 12% picked "Political violence and extremism" and 16% picked "Threats to democratic values and norms" (Page 1)

    Overall, do you think efforts by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deal with unauthorized immigration in the country... (Page 10)

    Go too far           58% 
    Do not go far enough 12%
    Are about right      26%
    
    Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Donald Trump is handling the following issues? Immigration (Page 3)

    Strongly approve    26%
    Somewhat approve    14%
    Somewhat disapprove 10%
    Strongly disapprove 43%

    Generally speaking, would you say the following things are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track? Immigration policy (Page 5)

    Right direction 35%
    Wrong track     51%
    Don’t know      11%

P.S. I don't claim this comment to be unbiased, I clearly "cherry-picked" certain facts, but they were not out of context nor did I massage the numbers, the reason I phrased it this way was because it was a direct rebuttal to the claim that most Americans support ICE [even after the shootings].

[1] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-febru... [2] https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR... [3] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-say-federal-i... [4] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... [5] https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Nav...

What year do you think it is? The US is actively aggressive in multiple areas of the world. As a non US citizen I don’t think helping that effort at the expense of the rest of the world is good.

The US military is famous for purely acting in self defence...

That's pretty bad.

Its not approved yet I think.

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