[davedx]

Could this be legally construed as anti-competitive behavior?

Edit: I asked Claude. It replied:

> Consumer protection / deceptive practices. In the EU this would be a clear UCPD (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive) issue and potentially a DSA violation. In the US, FTC Act §5 prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts." Selling a product that secretly performs worse than advertised for a commercially self-serving reason, without disclosure, is textbook deception. The Samsung/Apple battery throttling cases are instructive here: Apple faced regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions specifically because users weren't told.

> Competition law. This is where "anti-competitive" gets complicated. Refusing to help competitors build competing products via your ToS is generally legal — you can decide who you license to. But covertly sabotaging output quality for a class of users while charging them full price crosses into different territory. Under EU competition law (Article 102 TFEU), if a company with dominant market position uses covert technical means to disadvantage competitors, that's closer to abusive conduct than a legitimate ToS restriction.

[anon373839]

Anthropic’s behavior reeks of insecurity. Imagine Google taking elaborate measures to prevent you from searching about search engine development!

[j2kun]

Instead, Google gave up on search engine development /s

[tgtweak]

Implying that google's "snippets" were never curated to remove anti-google facts or that they didn't curate the search results in their favor...

[greenrd]

I think either you've prompted Claude misleadingly, or it's interpreting the law unnecessarily prissily (which is a failure mode I've noticed LLMs falling into).

This clearly is disclosed, otherwise how did we get to know about it?

[Game_Ender]

What's not clearly disclosed is when you are being limited and what the bounds are. If you are developing ML kernels for a computational photography use case will the safe guards miss-fire and sabotage or slow down your efforts? What about distributed GPU interconnect work for a nation super computer lab used in weather simulation?

The reason they are doing this shadow ban style technique, is they don't want users to figure out how to jail break their way out. Or the explicit direct bad PR of when it miss-fires.

[kiv_apple]

"Shadow ban"-like mechanic in contractual relationships is generally against the law.

You either refuse to work with customer or do your job well (at least as well as other tasks of other customers). "I'll accept your task, but silently and intentionally do my job badly" may violate some laws.

[hashmap]

They do not disclose when the service is degraded, and the admission of that here seems like it would do a plaintiff's work for them.