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.
They keep doing anti-competitive things over and over again, and the end users seems to refuse to see it. They do whatever they can to get vendor-lock in.
Anthropic is acting like any regular selfish corporation despite their PBC status. They are becoming a stain on humanity. Power will corrupt anyone, it seems.
I think the key part is not to depend on their harness where it operates in proprietary ways. At bare minimum, if you can plugin an OpenAI model or even X or Google model that operates close to the same level, you will have a fallback, even if it isn't an open one itself.
Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.
If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).
Flash is runnable in various gpu + cpu offload configurations. Not saying that 27b is bad (far from it, especially if they get n-grams in it with... hopefully today's release), saying that flash is runnable at decent speeds on way less than you'd imagine.
As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.
I wouldn't say it's weird not to subscribe to Anthropic at all. We're in a thread specifically describing a good reason not to!
Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.
There is nothing open-weight that even comes close IMO. The only half-decent model that 99% of people can actually dream of running locally is Qwen 3.8 27B.
I think this is an unfortunate reality that many miss. For simple and procedural tasks, yes, there are awesome alternatives. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 is my favourite by far. But for the headlining complex applications, and for consistently reliable reviewing, the gap is genuinely so remarkably far that it is hard to imagine having any alternative in the near future. The closest is the (very expensive) Kimi K3.1 Pro, which is, in my experience, roughly where Anthropic and OpenAI were near the start of the year. DeepSeek is a year behind in this domain. All open models have still yet to cross that monumental improvement that happened around Fable / Sol mid-year.
Depends what you mean by running locally, but it's not in the realm of dreaming to think we're going to be able to run open-weight models of Opus 5.5 quality soon, likely in the next 3-6 months. You may not be able to run it on your laptop but you will be able to run them in a federated way or on cloud-rental compute cheaply and easily.
I don't care about my skills because employers won't request me to do anything that violates the terms of service of $CURRENT_LLM. At the same time, it's a reminder not to outsource thinking to someone's computer.
It's not just the anti-competitive behaviour, it's also the anti-privacy behaviours that are not muched talked about. They embedded a spyware and got caught too:
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.
I wanted fable to scan an old user profile backup of mine and create a list of folders that were safe to delete. Refused, wanted to fall back to some ancient version of opus. Wtf.
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.
US/EU here (both, due to traveling), same story with anything related to modifying existing weights or SotA approaches in training/research, it's not a geolocation issue. The safeguards don't check your IP (but pretty soon will check someone's IP [pun intended])
Claude has been building me a bespoke inference and training stack (optimized kernels and all), feeding traces from my previous sessions directly into a LoRA adapter. Zero friction.
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.
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.
Fairness isn’t the relevant lens. Copyright isn’t the right lens either. This is purely might-makes-right, where the winner is whoever has the best offence and best defence.
It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.
Well their justification is that distillation is bad because it means baddies can get their own models without their safeguards and then make anthrax nukes or whatever. Even though it's self serving, it's at least self-consistent.
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 have been doing RL for Magic the Gathering (longshot but having fun). Several times it triggered this flag. But that was a couple months ago. Everyone went crazy over Astra so I switched to open ai and had no issues. People are now going crazy over opus 5.5 so I’m playing with that.
Haven’t hit any issues so far, but two months in the code is very dirty but functional enough that I’m redoing it with more heavy hand holding.
I recommend having a paper as reference in mind if you don’t already know what you’re doing. I’m referencing the Stratego paper as reading that a year ago gave me the inspiration to try MTG.
Every model I’ve used has had a lot of trouble but if it wasn’t I figure I wouldn’t be having as much fun as I’ve been having or learning so much.
We were never this absolutist about intellectual property when individuals were the perpetrators. I don’t feel morally entitled to criticise Big AI for doing what individuals have done for centuries.
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.
> 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.
His tweet says:
> got tagged for "training a competitor,"
I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?
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).
Better block than falsify information. Last I heard they were deliberately botching it whenever someone asked semi-advanced questions on model training.
I don’t think it is revelation, it feels like active incompetence. You can lay out every decision and watch Claude/OpenAI actively fuck up in inexplicable ways.
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.
3. LLMs are fully commoditized, your country funds training of SoTA models, your town runs them in the municipal data center; everything tax-funded. You can use them for a modest fee, as easily as taking a train. When interacting with those LLMs, your privacy is guaranteed by law.
How many municipalities offer the services of ISPs? I know it’s not zero, but decades of private ISPs leading the market leads me to believe municipal data centers won’t be made available to residents.
How often would municipal data centers need to upgrade/replace hardware? What impact would that have on local tax levy rates?
Would you choose to relocate your family to the next town over because they have more available RAM?
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.
Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.
If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).
As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.
Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.
https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/models?sort=created
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no 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.
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.
I am US based, with defender level cyber access.
most important bit…: stealing world's data…
It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.
Haven’t hit any issues so far, but two months in the code is very dirty but functional enough that I’m redoing it with more heavy hand holding.
I recommend having a paper as reference in mind if you don’t already know what you’re doing. I’m referencing the Stratego paper as reading that a year ago gave me the inspiration to try MTG.
Every model I’ve used has had a lot of trouble but if it wasn’t I figure I wouldn’t be having as much fun as I’ve been having or learning so much.
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
Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.
> but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.
Why? Anthropic's dream is to be exempted from copyright altogether. They've been trying to achieve exactly that:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/anthropic...
Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?
Another way of saying is that hard work that advances the state of the art should be rewarded. Patents should exist.
I’m sure they are watching what I’m doing and would retaliate via service cut off and legal action if I crossed it egregiously and they found out.
I would do the same thing if a user or employee did this to my IP.
I don’t completely buy the argument of web scraping being an IP violation.
I don’t send my core ip in an email to my main competitors and I don’t post it on the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
https://www.thedailybeast.com/aaron-swartzs-unbending-prosec...
If an individual had done what Anthropic continues to do then they would be jailed for life.
Anthropic's business model is premised on intellectual property theft. They take it without paying for it.
You are compromising your ethical framework by using Anthropic's products.
Because corporations are not moral agents; they're economic agents. This arrangement would be great for shareholder, nothing more.
I suspect this person was actively using it to generate or classify training data directly.
I suspect that's the difference here. I'm not trying to use Claude to build a competitor. I'm doing small scale research.
... says:
His tweet says: I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?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).
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.
Even if you take it down, you can just torrent it.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:151e277c267b3b4880ae93ef405977009599a6f3&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateface.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateface.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Fpirateface.co%2Fapi%2Fws%2FQwen%2FQwen3.8-27B-FP8%2F017b9c7af6b5689d5dd426a76e0bc077eb5ca20a%2F
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?
How is it a secret if everyone has a model that is exactly like the other. Surely there are no secrets
Not yet, especially not with all of the incestuous cross-hiring that all the labs do.
But perhaps the various L. Bob Rife variants running these labs are using their advanced unreleased models to work on their own Snow Crashes.
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.
How often would municipal data centers need to upgrade/replace hardware? What impact would that have on local tax levy rates?
Would you choose to relocate your family to the next town over because they have more available RAM?