Comment by nozzlegear
4 days ago
Anecdata point: I canceled my ChatGPT pro subscription last year over some shitty thing Altman did at OpenAI and easily moved over to Claude. The only thing I took with me was the system prompt or whatever it's called, I couldn't care less about my conversation history. I'm planning to do the same thing with my Claude subscription if Anthropic kowtows to the Pentagon. These services are not sticky at all IMO.
Anthropic already decided to do business with the "killing people" department of the government. I think the battle was lost there, rather than whether or not they cross a line in the sand they drew to act as if they're the ethical AI company despite making products that are used to kill people. I'm sure the result of this battle will be some compromise that allows the Pentagon to get whatever they want while offering a fig leaf to Anthropic to continue their ethicality show.
Yes, I just caught up on all the Anthropic x Pentagon news this morning. I've canceled my subscription and let them know why in the feedback. It's too bad because I liked the Claude models, but I can easily swap the Claude app out with DuckDuckGo and use one of the open models my DDG subscription supports.
Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action[1], a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[2], a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children.
The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs.
As for why Blackburn supports KOSA[3]:
> Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.”
If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you. Web platforms will finally be able to sell their userbases as identifiable and monetizable humans to their partners/advertisers/governments/facial recognition systems/etc. AI companies will legally enshrine themselves as the official gatekeepers and censors of the internet, and they will be paid to train on the totality of novel human creativity in real-time.
That will be their moat.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
[2] https://publicfirstaction.us/news/public-first-action-and-de...
[3] https://www.them.us/story/kosa-senator-blackburn-censor-tran...
Where are you thinking of moving to?
I have been positively surprised with Mistral which I have been trying out.
I'd probably swap to one of the open models available through my DuckDuckGo subscription. I don't keep up with the AI hype so I don't know what options exist out there beyond ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini right now.