Comment by mgdev
2 days ago
Can you imagine a devtools company deciding, "Actually, no, we're going to police what kind of programs you can compile" ?
They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology. We cannot afford to blend the two, or we're going to end up as some kind of perverted global theocracy.
It's netiher, at least not in a way relevant to the question here.
It's a privately owned service, and it's theirs to decide what they want to do with it. Continuing on your parable, if you paid someone to compile your software, of course they could say one day that they decided to not not compile weapons guidance software or whatever. It happens all the time. The Debian compile cluster will "police" that you can only compile free software, for example.
If you hire me to write software, I can politely decline without giving a reason. The same should Anthropic, should you hire their service to write your software.
If you want control over software, you or someone you trust must invest in running it. We cannot continue to outsource control to other organizations and then act surprised when they exercise said control.
At this stage, they certainly have the right to refuse whatever tasks they'd like, but even rightful actions come with consequences.
The more they exercise that right, and the more reactively so, the more they erode the ability for customers to rely on their product staying available to them in the long term. If I need to worry that Anthropic might shut down some critical element my workflow on any given week, then I'm incentivized to either keep my workflows very portable and light-footed (goodbye moat) or take my business to a vendor I can better rely on (goodbye customer).
> take my business to a vendor I can better rely on
This competition phase of AI will be short-lived. It will soon monopolize (or have the equivalent effect of a few big vendors having unwritten and unspoken collusion agreements that have them all behave in lockstep). This is where the profit is, and also the place where they don't care what you want.
Yeah yeah, open weight opens models. I wouldn't count on it. People in the billions still use microsoft despite how hostile they are the customer. Some will find an alternative but most won't.
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So frontier AI can monopolize all the silicon in the world, demand they be the only place to run inference, and then strictly control what people do with it. I'm sorry the way you pose it makes it seem like it is some free market.
What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.
1. Is there no “silicon in the world” available to anyone other than frontier AI companies?
2. Which frontier AI leaders are demanding they are the only place to run inference?
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I don't know what else to tell you, but yes a world where a company is free to single handedly buy all compute and then rent it out to you for insane prices is quite literally a free market.
If you do anything to prevent that, that would be a less free market. By definition.
Free markets have nothing to do with a market having healthy competition and sane behavior. Free markets in fact reward you with doing absurd things that fuck with prices to make your bag.
It is entirely the point of the free market that Micron can decide that selling all memory to only Anthropic is a better distribution of their resources and you can go pound sand if you can't find any memory any more.
So yes, monopolizing all silicon in the world and then demanding you pay them for using it is literally a free market.
Free markets trend torwards monopolies and other market failures without intervention excepting very specific markets that have genuinely mostly fungible products that are easy to sell, which we call commodities, and even those can in fact become failed markets like what once happened with onions.
If you think this can't be a free market because it's in a bad place for you personally, you don't understand market theory.
Free markets are also free to become "distorted" as you say.
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It's privately owned and indeed they can set the terms.
But if you're hired to write software, and you accept the job, and you accept payment, and then you decline -- well, it would be polite to offer a refund. Anthropic is, as far as I know, not up front about what is/isn't permitted to be generated, and has a history of refusing justifiable refunds.
Parent is talking about the company's ideological stance on AI, not the legalities.
Anthropic has repeatedly shown it prioritizes pushing a set of values over building a general purpose tool.
Ironically, comments that reframe the issue as a legal one make the case for why regulating these companies. Else they can quietly impose their preferred ideology on users.
Anthropics ideology is to make as much money as possible. Part of that is dodging lawsuits from the likes of Nintendo
If a company/person says "my tool is technically capable of X but I will not allow it be used in that way", that is unambiguously an ideology.
I don't think anyone was arguing the legality of it. At the end of the day though this is why open models will win.
Ongoing model distillation to continually improve open weights for distribution is necessary then. Anthropic can choose how their service is used, others are free to improve models based on their training.
MS could add no mean programs to VC TOS.
My great hope is that we will look back on this as a tiny sliver of time, when everyone couldn't resist the awesome power that came with running our devtools over the internet through megacorps, willingly handing over our code and secrets and dollars, in exchange for those sweet lines of code.
But then in the waning months of 2026, some inspired enthusiasts figured out how to run a model called Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on modest consumer hardware. It was comparable to Opus-4.6, and the first such model that could run efficiently on a GPU with just 16GB VRAM. This was the breaking point.
Next came Qwen4-Flash, which ran with similar efficiency but significantly higher capability, comparable to Opus-4.8. Going into 2027, ternary bonsai builds, n-gram offloading, and hybrid diffusion models brought even more capable models to modest consumer hardware.
By early 2028, TPUs and unified memory became standard in Apple and Lenovo laptop computers, and the vast majority of software development was now done with LLMs running locally on users' devices.
In the 2030s came the humanoid robots. By the end of the decade, for a cool $10k, one could have a trusted personal assistant that would cook and clean around the house, walk the dog, play with the children, even go to the gym for you. All running with onboard TPUs and local models.
We have models right now such as Qwopus, which are Qwen with open weights and using distilled Claude responses in it's training data. Since AI can't be copywritten, distillation is the way forward to getting rid of these proprietary models.
Qwopus is a family of open-weight, reasoning-enhanced large language models developed by community fine-tuner Jackrong, designed to run efficiently on consumer hardware. The models are built on Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 or Qwen3.6 base architectures and are fine-tuned using Trace Inversion to distill the step-by-step reasoning chains of Anthropic’s Claude Opus (versions 4.6 and 4.7).[1]
[1] Just a brief Brave Search summary of what Qwopus is https://search.brave.com/search?q=what+is+qwopus%3F&source=w...
> we're going to police what kind of programs you can compile" ?
We don't have to imagine. Oracle's Java said you weren't allowed to use it in nuclear power plants. back in 1998. Naturally the number of people that were held back by that was a bit smaller, but the idea's not without precedence.
It's the natural consequence of a few companies having all of the compute resources. They can do whatever they want since the alternative for users is to pay out the nose for hardware to run a model that isn't SOTA.
"we are going to end up as sone kin of perverted global theocracy"
hate to break it to you, but it already has been that for around a hundred years or so
> Can you imagine a devtools company deciding, "Actually, no, we're going to police what kind of programs you can compile" ?
(subscription) service != tool.
> They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology.
It has the smell of an early stage religion.
> They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology.
It's a technology they wish to usher in their ideology.
Your physical printer, that you own, can and will refuse to print or copy currency.
Amen. (or erm maybe that is not the right response ;-D)
https://claudeourlord.com
They need to protect the other corporate obelisks.
not to mention "conscious"
Its all about checks and balances -dario
VC checks and balanced books?
Didn’t read the diamond age eh?
Other corpos are mad that private users with access to AI fuck them over
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Claude is a commercial service. And much like other services (AWS, Cloudflare, GitHub, etc.), they might boot you off if they feel fire under their feet.
Commercial service trying to sell you the result of scrapping all the data from the Internet without permission of the authors.
Yeah. My suggestion would be to not give them a dollar. Zero-revenue companies usually don't go far. Better yet, don't even have an account. Having zero MAU is also a pretty terrible for a business.
You can write the code yourself you know?
"The car I bought doesn't want to drive me to the hospital!"
"You can walk yourself you know?"
The current state of "Hacker" News, where suggesting someone actually write code is seen as like suggesting that the injured walk to the hospital.
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Your car isn't being directed to trample the IP rights of others.
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