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It's very clear to me that however much you like Claude and Anthropic models, every professional user shoudl be actively cultivating a set of alternatives and fallbacks to use and seeking to ensure the overall ecosystem is as open, standardised and portable as possible.

Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.

What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.

The guardrails on Anthropic have become an albatross. I've got OAI models doing testing of banking workflows that Claude would have a full scale panic attack over. Even OAI needs some alignment and reassurance regarding the fact that it's not about to pull credit for a real person. GPT6.1 will happily launch the nukes 100% of the time if you make a clear and rational case in your system prompt.

Forcing this kind of safety into the models and harnesses is a mistake. I think the strategy of post hoc moderation is the right one. Trying to prevent evil ideological activities as they transpire is a cursed mission. Let someone who is genuinely doing a naughty thing accumulate a meaningful body of evidence and then send in Mr Holmes (the FBI / police). Attempting to prevent wrong think at every token is too granular. We have systems designed to handle the possibility that crime and punishment may occur at separate moments in time. Most people don't go around murdering because the eventual consequences are pretty severe. Just because an AI gave you advice doesn't magically make those existing consequences vanish.

Something I've seen it do recently is refusing to extract services out of my own monolith code base because it finds copying code morally wrong.

But its refusal to work pattern is getting pretty obnoxious. Another one I ran into last week was it refused to start a developer session to do browser testing for a code base it was working on because signing in was suddenly against it's programming.

It listed all the conditions it needed for a sign in to be possible, agreed that my code base met all conditions, but refused to progress. I tried it in multiple fresh sessions with the same result.

Intelligence has to become a commodity. If your setup does not allow you to hot-swap a Claude Code with a Pi running astra and move on, you will be in trouble.

Five years ago I was spending up to €1000 a day in Google ads for my star-map company, Greaterskies. After a few months of meetings with an ever-rotating group of "experts" working for Google, and advising me in my ads strategy, I had reached a point where most of my revenue was going to Google. What was left was barely enough to keep going.

This is what capture feels like. You still own your company, but you are essentially an operator making money for someone else.

I think this will be the fate of people who allow their processes to be captured by the model providers. Always run at least two harnesses, and make sure that they are swappable.

This user is based in Hong Kong, where Claude is geo-blocked and not available. If you try visiting claude.ai from a Hong Kong IP address, you get an "unavailable in this region" message.

They are likely accessing Claude via a VPN. Doing model training work over a VPN is a highly suspicious signal, and likely triggers Anthropic's classifiers. It's not surprising that their account got flagged.

Claude’s aggressive classifier and highly opinionated rules make the recent models a giant pain to work with. It’s a great coding model but I argue with it at least once a day. It even injects its dumb rules and moral standing into artifacts it creates, like I asked a cloud session to help me create a system prompt to remove “Generated by Claude” footers from everything and the output had a sneakily inserted “Except GitHub issues and PRs. Those are exempt from these rules.”

If I didn’t have a subscription that doesn’t cost me anything, I would use gpt instead. At least gpt models don’t lecture me constantly.

- Refusal to log me in to websites in remote browsers. I was in the mountains and urgently had to submit something so I wanted to remotely use Claude on my Mac at home to help me but it told me it will never log me in because it won’t impersonate users

- Refusal to repeat XHR requests automated in a browser for me to do something (“no, I will only do what a user would do I’m only gonna click around”)

- refusal to enter ANY credential into any scripts, even dummy or dev tokens (“you have to do that yourself. I won’t do it and that’s the last I say of this”)

- constant [cyber] for very small tasks when it becomes a tiny bit technical, even though I’m in the cyber program. With gpt or glm/deepseek I can at least ask cs questions or explore binaries

And the list goes on. Every day it’s a coin flip whether it complies with something or won’t and I have to use OpenCode Go instead that I have as backup now.

At this point Claude is good for coding and that’s it. It’s a tool that doesn’t do what I tell it to and gives me snappy remarks from his opinionated morale high ground. I went from full on Claude maxi to hating everything they did with the 5.5 generation

The fact that these corporations don’t spontaneously collapse from the sheer weight of irony is a continuing disappointment for me.

Perhaps a manifest index/list of training data and learning method should be mandatory for “public” use of any model, sort of like food ingredient package labeling. The list of texts used and any weighting seems important to facilitate a public understanding / debate of model expectations and behavior.

(copied from my Twitter account):

This is precisely why I killed my Anthropic subscription in favour of a (more expensive and probably less intelligent) Codex sub.

The false positives were bad enough, but the true positives are unacceptable too. Shameless greed and an attempt to stifle competition.

This week, I asked Claude Code to generate an MD to continue working on another computer, without losing the context, and it refused claming some sort of extraction. It was only until I selected Opus, that it completed the request.

> You built your models on the world's data

most important bit…: stealing world's data…

This week I hit walls twice with Fable and Opus 5.5, where I was blocked for safety/cybersecurity risks... doing stuff on my own LAN/proxmox server under my desk and writing custom firmware to my own devices plugged into USB. Only Opus 4.8 was able to complete the task. If they keep this up, I will re-evaluate my day-to-day AI assistant.

One must wonder about the strength of their “moat” if they feel this sort of thing is necessary.

Why would one assume larger is needed? I am an AI professor doing work on a wide variety of things but Anthropic models have cost me so much time even when not blocked. My old Anthropic agent wrote rules into its system prompt to avoid all machine learning work. My openai ones do the work but tell me they need to correct my opinions (on fields I helped found) so that they are aligned with the consensus....

Mostly using open models from China in the past two months + Argon.

This is not a ban, but the Opus 5.5 "safeguard" interrupting a query.

Open Weight MUST be our common future

What's the point of accusing of hypocrisy someone whose business is built on theft.

Will Claude help me with reinforcement learning code for games? Or is that too small-fry for it to refuse? I've been playing around with RL with the new DeepSeek Flash model but it seems to trip up over itself a bit.

I'm using it to train models with a novel linear flash attention mechanism right now. No refusals, and it's been running for at least a week solid.

I suspect this person was actively using it to generate or classify training data directly.

How are other frontier shops handling this? Are Astra and Carbon/Argon also this anticompetitive? Or are they more chill about AI/LLM research?

Holy shit man the lockdown is coming. I've used claude to set up my abliterated qwen local LLM setup, but they're gonna eventually lock that down too.

I wanted to finetune it a bit, I wonder if I am gonna have to dogfood if claude refuses to help me.

If you don't have a local LLM setup you're gonna be permanant local LLM-less underclass.

Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.

I ask it questions about large models like big MoEs all the time. I’ve never had it refuse a question, but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.

For training data from existing models I just get open models to spill their guts. It’s fine

In industry we train employees to not reveal proprietary information.

I think it would be easier to do this for a model than a lot of employees

Kindof old news, they've been doing this for months...

If anyone out there wants to pay for my LLM bill, I'll record and send you all the outputs they generate in exchange (perhaps with some exceptions).

I mean, these AI companies have money, and they want data. I have data, and I want money. Maybe we can work something out.

In a world where buying and selling data is central to entire industries, why shouldn't I gather and sell my own data?

Ha, I took a side gig training ai models and thought let's use my corporate claude account to help with that, somehow it figured out that this was such a gig(probably because I let it read my emails) and said it'll pass on this one.

The corollary to the Hippocratic oath: first, don't let them kill you.

This is sadly not surprising to me as if you listened to/watched the [Latent Space episode on Opus 5.5](https://latent.space/p/how_anthropic_ships_the_1_llm_in_the_...) 25 minutes into the podcast and instead of talking about how they've released one of the best models in the world, they were busy talking about the changes to the API and why normies must not be trusted to perform inference outside of Dario's blessing.

It's frankly disgusting and really makes me not want to use Anthropic, despite previously feeling aligned with a lot of what Anthropic published.

Time to switch, or a mixed model/agent approach

I mean, the more friction and barriers they add, the more people will start to leave to other models. There is no moat. Risky move for them.

Is anyone else trying to quickly hammer out useful tools before everything gets banned?

The author's homepage: https://jiahao-shao1.github.io/

... says:

    > My research aims to build a general-purpose agent that can understand, reason, and act in the physical world — at the intersection of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and embodied AI.

    > got tagged for "training a competitor,"

Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).

Imagine apple owned one of two code editors, any time it detected you working on android os, it blocked you

I have been using it to train a few BERT models.

There have been a lot of write-ups about the future of AI. I see two distinct futures:

1. You get ID'd and biometrically scanned to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by an opaque censorship system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot even open a bank account because they don't have an address.

2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run suffiently powerful models on the client computers.

My bet is on 1.

end to end encryption to ai chats pls

Wonder why they got downgraded to junk status yesterday for their IPO.... the bad taste in everyones mouth might have something to do with it

US Security Chip act next, your GPU will soon enforce these restrictions too

User is based out of Hong Kong. Claude isn't available to Hong Kong so how are they using it?

how oddly entitled. they built their non-deterministic black box of bullshit from surreptitiously acquired data. it's cute to see the ignorant thieves attempting to 'protect' their empire of shit.