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Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

Given the Anthropic shenanigans, do you trust the personal harness code it wrote for you?

It did not write it for me, I used it to add a feature I wanted. It's a pretty small and understandable codebase, in fact :)

Does anyone know what’s gone wrong with Anthropic?

They used to be a decently credible company with not-too-shady behaviour...

I hope they can actually regain some credibility…

They've only been around 5 years and have grown tremendously during that time. There's no stable reputation you can rely on yet.

They just show their true face. You’ve been lied all this time. They were never “good”.

I used to interact with the LW crowd… and they were mostly not outright swindlers or scoundrels. (from what I could sense)

I think it’s fair to say most had decent respectability.

Anthropic hired heavily from that pool so it’s astonishing how it turned out.

Everything they do is understandable if you think they are being honest when they say they're building superintelligence.

In this case they want to prevent a nation that censors its citizenry, puts/disappears dissidents into concentration camps for decades, and makes its own human rights lawyers literally eat their own shit, before raping and/or murdering them, from reaching superintelligence.

In this light, some client side code to potentially identify and ban the Chinese labs to slow them down by even a few days, is totally reasonable.

And do a -10 in their reputation. Plus blow up on hn first item on home page. I’m sure they are not very happy about this. And the sentiment of the people is going more negative by the week.

I have a feeling they will eventually drop the facade of “we’re the nice and ethic people” and will work with palantir so they can survive the future: ipo and models bans.

I doubt Anthropic cares about the HN front page.

They've done a bunch of things that hurt their valuation to stick to their red lines. To me it just reads as unsupported cynicism to call it a facade.

At that time made sense to stick to keep the image. But eventually money > image. I have no doubt they will do whatever it takes to keep going. Even if that means killing people.

It's extremely bizarre to think Anthropic of all companies will kill people, given that they are probably the only tech company in the modern era that has demonstrated some moral backbone, even under threat of being shut down. There are way more companies at the top of the list here that have no moral compass, like Meta etc.

Enshitification. Too big to.. upset the govt.

I don't think many people care that they are trying to detect resellers and distillation.

It also doesn't seem very consistent to fixate on that while sending Anthropic everything about you via your day to day prompts, every line of the projects and environments you're working on at work, etc.

Their credibility comes from having one of the best models.

This sounds similar to what people were saying regarding Microsoft when the shady tricks of consumer Windows 10 versions were revealed.

…And then Windows 11 became even worse.

Surely we can do better than vague gesturing on HN.

For one, stake out a concrete position so people have something of substance to respond to.

You replied to me in the first place… I didn’t seek out one of your comments to reply to?

This ask doesn’t make sense.

Their philosophy is what's gone wrong.

It has some good effects on the their models, like Claude seeking cooperation first. But the people behind the company have a typical "unconstrained" (in the Sowell vision sense) perspective that assumes that they know better, so they are righteous for attempting to control things (users, paying customers, their model outputs, their tool chain, the supposed deity they assume they will produce... etc.)

Yeah I guess there is a slight undertone that they are the superiors… with the rest of the tech world being the inferiors.

But I hadn’t thought that as anything more than temporary flights of fancy.

Amodei world: pompous zealot with God complex

Altman world: malfeasant nihilist with God complex

When have they ever been credible? They have always been shady with their talk of safety, Dario was the one who wrote back in 2019 that GPT 2 was too dangerous to release.

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