Comment by demosthanos
2 hours ago
There is an enormous difference between:
* Exploiting ambiguity around fair use at a large scale before the law catches up and then jointly lobbying with your competition to make sure your interpretation of the law becomes reality.
* Explicitly signing a contract with enterprises to respect their IP and then proceeding to break that contract with your own customers.
The former is firmly in the gray area of legality and doesn't directly hurt your own customers. The latter is both an unambiguous contract violation and a flagrant attack on your own customers' most valuable asset.
https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
> Personal data we collect or receive to train our models
> • Data that our users or crowd workers provide, including Inputs and Outputs from our Services (unless users opt out)
> • Feedback that users explicitly provide about our Services
> • Materials flagged for safety, security, or policy review
While I don’t have visibility into individual corp contracts, hitting tab on a FIM is ‘feedback’, so it is not so clear cut.
First: This is the general privacy policy, not the enterprise contract. I don't know what goes into the enterprise contract, but I do know that our legal department spent a very long time making sure it was satisfactory before we got access.
Second: My argument doesn't hinge on Anthropic not being able to weasel their way out in court if it came to that. My argument is that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are going to break their signed contracts or even fudge on the clearly communicated understandings of what the terms of the API pricing are because neither one wants to hand the other the obvious weapon of: "unlike {other guys} we honor our word".
It's just not happening, and comparisons upthread to the fair use story totally misunderstand the incentives at play here.
(And as an aside, this whole thread also shows clearly the classic programmer misunderstanding of the law. The peanut butter sandwich instructions analogy is for code, not for the law. The law doesn't actually work by allowing any possible interpretation to hold equal weight the way that many programmers think it does.)
> The law doesn't actually work by allowing any possible interpretation to hold equal weight the way that many programmers think it does
Is that so? Recent rulings in the US specifically gave me the impression that when backed by sufficient legal representation and goodwill on the judging side indeed any possible interpretation will suffice.
I think that's what makes law making complicated - you either err on the side of leaving too much room for interpretation or not enough.
retention for 'safety' -> AI race as national security -> training on your data for 'national security' aka safety
It's simple mental calisthenics. If you are handing an organization whose entire business model is built on stealing data with spurious reasoning, what do you actually expect they will do? Don't be a fool.
This argument would hold more weight if Anthropic and OpenAI main customers weren’t massive trillion dollar companies with legal teams capable of burying just about anyone, anywhere, for even the mildest contract violation. Something that OpenAI is getting some close up experience with at the moment.
I'd like to see you try using mental calisthenics against a well-funded legal department. Let me know what the judge says.
> Explicitly signing a contract with enterprises to respect their IP and then proceeding to break that contract with your own customers.
You mean all the conditions that are attached to Fable use? My enterprise is deliberately holding off because those are unacceptable.
That suggests the system working as it should. They present terms for use, you don't like them, so your don't use it. One of their other products has terms you're ok with, so you use that product.
Good, fine. This is an example of trusting the company to honor their own terms, not the opposite.