[Sol-]

This has dampened my opinion on Anthropic quite a bit. It's difficult to take their marketing for AI as an empowering technology seriously when they are quite clear in their new deployments that they do not mean empowering for you, but empowering for them and organizations that are in their (or the US government's, despite Anthropics performative disagreements with the administration) good graces. You are allowed to vibe code some dashboards, a web app or let it drive Excel, but anything more interesting than that is forbidden.

If it was just plain monetary concerns and sabotage of competitors I'd almost be fine with it, but it seems they actively want to monopolize most of human progress in their enlightened hands, lest the mob does something undesirable with these powers.

[thewebguyd]

Don't forget their push for full regulatory capture in the name of "safety" as well so they can pull the ladder up behind them before anyone else has an equally capable model and releases it without the anti-competitive safeguards, while also pushing to completely ban open weight models, or any model trained on a certain level of compute without "rigorous" government testing and validation (which I'm sure, they'll conveniently provide the framework for).

Dampened opinion on Anthropic is an understatement.

[reactordev]

They are the only ones I’ve contacted my bank to get a charge back on…

[trhway]

i wonder if some lawyer may see a consumer protection class action here. In my view the Stuxnet that Anthropic pulled over its customers isn't much different from say those unauthorized extra accounts by Wells Fargo.

[reactordev]

exactly my thoughts as well when I got my money back.

[californical]

Yeah, I cancelled my Claude subscription yesterday after learning about their attitude of intentionally sabotaging their paying customers.

Especially after trying Fable yesterday for some benign projects and being unimpressive relative to opus.

Rolling it back is the right move, but I’m still not convinced that using them is in my best interest anymore, I’m investigating open source cloud providers now.

[solenoid0937]

Opus is nowhere close to Fable. Fable feels at least one generation ahead to me. https://x.com/hyperagentapp/status/2064396004032463157

Edit: OpenAI will launch a similar model soon and I can't wait. We are entering a new era of agents.

[CuriouslyC]

Models are spiky. In some narrow domains (cybersecurity, for instance) it will be a generation ahead. On the other hand a lot of people don't see a measurable difference between Opus ~4.5 and 4.6/7/8, because Anthropic taught it how to do some hard stuff better, but they didn't give it better taste or make it produce cleaner solutions to simpler problems.

[zozbot234]

Fable is very much an incremental development over Opus, and even more incremental when properly compared to its existing counterparts GPT-Pro and Gemini Deep Research.

[kolinko]

ad

[itintheory]

Care to share any specifics?

[noworriesnate]

I have a design for a really complex software I want to build and there were gaps I knew of in the design. Opus couldn’t identify them but Fable did. I’m just talking about it reviewing the design, not coding. But yeah, it’s insanely expensive. It does spin off sub agents so I suspect it might be cheaper if you had it create a bunch of plan files and then pointed deepseek at this plan files or something like that

[conjectures]

What does this even mean?

[beng-nl]

Can you write a more specific question? I think the meaning of the comment is clear enough, but maybe you’re asking for more specifics? Ironically I can not understand what you are asking for with such a generic comment.

[conjectures]

> This is one awesome above a level.

> What does this even mean?

> What do you mean what does this mean?

...

[solenoid0937]

I added a link.

[varenc]

Google has been doing the same thing for longer than Anthropic[0]. To protect their models from distillation attacks, they silently will downgrade the model's performance to essentially poison your training data without your knowledge.

A bit different than Anthropic refusing to assist with any AI development at all, but it's in the same vein and seems not widely known.

edit: reading the whole series of Google's AI Threat Tracker articles also provides some insight into threats Anthropic and others are dealing with

[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dis...

[chiwilliams]

Thanks for flagging this. This is interesting

[Rapzid]

"Only I can save us". It's a classic tragedy and cautionary tale.

The idea Anthropic was going to speed run AI so they could control the usage and make it "safe" for humanity was never altruistic; it was a HUGE FUCKING RED FLAG.

[DANmode]

Benevolent dictators work.

But, looking to a US corp to be one?

That’s daft.

[hungryhobbit]

They do, but only for specific definitions of "work". Like, benevolent dictators in Cuba 100% raised the literacy rate by an insane amount in just a few years (something like 20% => 80%").

If you define work as "literacy", they no doubt succeeded. But if you consider the people (and children) they tortured, raped, and murdered, suddenly literacy doesn't seem so important.

[DANmode]

I meant in the context of a software project, for example.

[xvector]

You're right, they should just not even try and turn off all safeguards on frontier AI. What could possibly go wrong? It's not like a bunch of companies and nonprofits have said the model finds zero days at the press of a button!

[gmanley]

Correct, they should. If there are zero days out there, then they should be able to be found by everybody, instead of only being found by the select elite that this model is available to. Though, I very much question the truth of said ability.

[thewebguyd]

And? Now all the zero days, if thats true, get discovered and patched instead of being exclusively hoarded by the select few governments and Israeli spyware companies.

Sounds like a great thing to me.

[vlan0]

Corporation cannot help but act this way. They are too big. The pressures for profit are all that matters. That is the priority. It doesn't matter what colorful words they put on the paper to make you feel better. Look at the "green" movement 20 years ago. All talk and no action.

Stop supporting organizations that don't put humans first. Don't believe a word that anyone says. Lip service is free

[rurp]

Yeah I'd say this has been a big concern ever since it turned out immensely expensive training methods could create effective frontier models. So far at least, open source models have kept up better than I expected, but they definitely lag the top ones and there's no guarantee the gap doesn't widen further.

Imagine the software world if Linux never existed as an effective OS and Microsoft + Apple had completely controlled computer platforms for the past decades. I think it's almost certain that both companies would be even more profitable, and the tech industry would be vastly less free and more dysfunctional .

[tlb]

Yes, that is basically the plan. It's based on the belief that unfettered AI would let anyone be a supervillain and destroy the world. There are enough would-be supervillains out there, but they rarely get far because they can't get teams of smart people to build doomsday machines for them. So the AI has to not let anyone do evil with it.

Unfortunately, that won't feel very much like freedom.

[lebovic]

It sounds like you might not agree with that belief.

While I don't agree with their actions here, I do think there's sufficient reason to hold that belief.

On some fronts (e.g. security, on which you've experienced more than me), I think there are surmountable challenges. But on other fronts (e.g. bio), a single errant actor could reasonably kill millions or billions of people with sufficiently powerful AI. We don't have good defenses here, and those actors do exist.

I still don't agree with these actions, but I do think I agree with their assumptions.

[zozbot234]

The model release cards for Opus have repeatedly and consistently stressed that the model doesn't have the fiddly know-how that's required to provide meaningful assistance in possibly dangerous subfields of biology. Mythos (Fable without the overly strict guardrails) has shown improvements in things like drug design, but even then the situation isn't really that different. This risk is ridiculously overblown, and the way to manage it sensibly is to introduce meaningful oversight for actors that seek to order the actual specialized materials involved (especially any synthetically generated genes/proteins/whatever).

[lebovic]

No, Anthropic's model cards have claimed that the models don't show considerably more uplift than previous ASL-3 models, which already showed material uplift.

I participated in the internal bioweapons uplift test for Sonnet 3.7, and even then, one non-expert got huge uplift from the model [1]. I'd consider evals a lower bound of capabilities that can be elicited from a model.

The team behind Biomni, a biomedical agent that's widely used by researchers, has continued to find consistent gains between models [2]. I trust them, because I visited them to build their HPC tool [3], which the model is quite capable of using – moreso than most grad students. The Biomni team cares a lot about about real usability for real researchers, so they have a great pulse on capabilties.

SecureBio also has some public evals [4], which have continued to show increasing uplift.

And while synthesis monitoring is a part of the solution, I think you might underestimate how much goes under the radar. See the Reedley lab incident for an example [5].

Is Anthropic still effectively throttling beneficial biomedical research? Yes! And so is OpenAI. But the underlying capability is still actually dual use.

[1]: See page 25 in https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/9ff93dfa8f445c932415d335c88852...

[2]: Their benchmark has a preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.12.724604v1...

[3]: https://x.com/phylo_bio/article/2029233694775624096

[4]: https://securebio.org/

[5]: Search for "ebola" in the public report for the Reedley lab incident at https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/se...

[zozbot234]

> No, Anthropic's model cards have claimed that the models don't show considerably more uplift than previous ASL-3 models, which already showed material uplift.

Doesn't this simply amount to disagreeing about what counts as "meaningful" from a bio-safety POV? Also, even the ASL-3 deployment safeguards for Opus 4 and higher were always adopted as a mere matter of caution; it's not clear that even Anthropic believed at any point that this reflected any genuine "threshold crossing" event. So it's just not obvious how much weight we're supposed to place on that particular stance.

[lebovic]

In normal bio, there are standardized biosafety levels, because without it there would be no standard agreement on what "meaningful" safety is. So yes, I do think there's ambiguity here.

But I don't think I've found any domain expert who thinks granting everyone raw access to the most capable models wouldn't meaningfully increase risk. OpenAI recently staffed a biological threat modeler to help quantify this risk.

(Edit: just saw your edit, this includes at Anthropic. ASL tiers were "rule-out" to exclude rather than "rule-in", so exact thresholds were murkier, but I think it's clear that models have passed that threshold by now.)

That said, there are clear steps and requirements to set up a BSL-2 or BSL-3 lab, and I think there should be similarly clear rules around model capabilties and access. The process for Anthropic and OpenAI is murky and still implictly gated on spend, which I think is holding back research.

For example, anyone who has access to a BSL-3 lab should have a clear and low-cost path to a model with corresponding capabilities, as long as they set up corresponding precautions for model access.

I think it would be a bad outcome for only frontier labs and a select few groups they choose to have access to the most capable models – which is sadly the precedent that's currently being set.

[giancarlostoro]

Even with them making those guardrails visible, it's a bit ridiculous in my eyes. I have been experimenting with smaller models, will Claude assume I'm some Chinese or Russian agent trying to distill their secrets and bar me from learning? Because that's insane. What if I discover a more efficient way to build models with Claude? Well, we'll never know now. What if someone else entirely could discover a breakthrough in how we design and build LLMs.

[ff3]

The whole shtick is to get you addicted whilst reducing your ability to go without, acquire power over you, jack up the prices whilst manipulating the quality of the tokens/output available to you.

Cant believe how stupid people are. You couldnt see this coming? Shame on you.

[giancarlostoro]

I already made up my mind, I'm not using that model if its sending proprietary code over to Anthropic, they can kiss my rear. If every frontier model winds up doing this, I will stop using them. There's plenty of employers / jobs where this is not okay behavior from an LLM.

[satvikpendem]

First time? They've always been misanthropic, ironically. They seem to hate their users and think that their AI is so dangerous it'll destroy the world and not to be trusted, I mean Anthropic was literally started because people at OpenAI thought the latter was too forgiving on "safety."

[inferniac]

Wouldnt call their goverment disagreements performative, they genuinely believe they should be the only ones deciding what AI can and cannot do

[squigglingAvia]

And we subsidize them (AI companies in general) with our tax dollars.

[hungryhobbit]

But, to be fair, we subsidize all of corporate America, not just AI companies.

[dragonwriter]

> If it was just plain monetary concerns and sabotage of competitors I'd almost be fine with it, but it seems they actively want to monopolize most of human progress in their enlightened hands

But that is “plain monetary concerns and sabotage of competitors”, they are just more ambitious than most people doing sabotage of competitors in the fields they hope to dominate by that tactic.

[maxdo]

how did you read it this way? Distill is such a big problem that distill attempts consist a significant share of their revenue(!).

A distill model with easy jailbreak can easily be used to coordinate terrorist attacks, or hostile government attacks. Read russia, north korea etc.

A distilled model can be used to rob your grandma in a very effective way. It's no longer about placing a few business logic requirements in js + css on your website. wake up .

[dominotw]

Dario's life story arc in his head when he realized what ai can do. Capture this thing and become the king of the world.

[BenRather]

Americans continuing to act shocked they're being cucked by corporations dampens trust and makes it difficult to buy into memes Americans are "exceptional" and "gritty", "educated", "world leaders".

Seriously the world is watching the American public get porked by grandpa and reconsidering putting their trust in not just US government as that's clearly failed, but the people themselves.

Occasional weekend warrior protest while our government destabilizes their lives? That's all the effort ya got for global allies and partners, eh?

[FpUser]

>"but it seems they actively want to monopolize most of human progress in their enlightened hands, lest the mob does something undesirable with these powers"

I think this is exactly what they want.

[pdntspa]

That level of control will be fleeting at best; as soon as the open models and competitors catch up they lose that influence

[simplyluke]

That's why Dario's advocating for making open weight models illegal and also saying we should stop the clock on model development amongst the large labs.

[oh_my_goodness]

Wait until you see the enshittification phase.