[nl]

I think it's a big mistake to conflate the cyber (and bio) refusals with the LLM development refusals.

I can sympathize with the argument for the cyber refusals - especially as a temporary measure - especially if Mythos is available to those trying to defend against vulnerabilities.

The LLM development nerfing (and now refusals) is very different though. Anthropic has even said it isn't just for safety reasons:

> Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms.

It's at least partially an anti-competitive measure.

The closest analogy is putting measures in a compiler to stop it being able to build other compilers.

Another analogy is priesthoods with secret religious knowledge that "only they are qualified to know".

[dannyw]

The Anthropic refusal description is even more direct.

“The request could assist the development of competing AI models, which is restricted under Anthropic's commercial terms. Benign machine learning work can also trigger this category.”

Source: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/refusa...