They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology. We cannot afford to blend the two, or we're going to end up as some kind of perverted global theocracy.
It's a privately owned service, and it's theirs to decide what they want to do with it. Continuing on your parable, if you paid someone to compile your software, of course they could say one day that they decided to not not compile weapons guidance software or whatever. It happens all the time. The Debian compile cluster will "police" that you can only compile free software, for example.
If you hire me to write software, I can politely decline without giving a reason. The same should Anthropic, should you hire their service to write your software.
If you want control over software, you or someone you trust must invest in running it. We cannot continue to outsource control to other organizations and then act surprised when they exercise said control.
But if you're hired to write software, and you accept the job, and you accept payment, and then you decline -- well, it would be polite to offer a refund. Anthropic is, as far as I know, not up front about what is/isn't permitted to be generated, and has a history of refusing justifiable refunds.
I'm also not saying Claude can't have their own terms.
But when government and private enterprise meet, we have problems.
The government—supposedly acting as and agent of the people but largely acting in the name of a more nebulous "national defense"—has the power to kingmake private companies that can act outside the normal checks and balances of those people, and in a way that distorts the normal market dynamics that would otherwise give people the power to vote with their dollar.
In other words, we lose the vote on both sides.
The more they exercise that right, and the more reactively so, the more they erode the ability for customers to rely on their product staying available to them in the long term. If I need to worry that Anthropic might shut down some critical element my workflow on any given week, then I'm incentivized to either keep my workflows very portable and light-footed (goodbye moat) or take my business to a vendor I can better rely on (goodbye customer).
This competition phase of AI will be short-lived. It will soon monopolize (or have the equivalent effect of a few big vendors having unwritten and unspoken collusion agreements that have them all behave in lockstep). This is where the profit is, and also the place where they don't care what you want.
Yeah yeah, open weight opens models. I wouldn't count on it. People in the billions still use microsoft despite how hostile they are the customer. Some will find an alternative but most won't.
What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.
If you do anything to prevent that, that would be a less free market. By definition.
Free markets have nothing to do with a market having healthy competition and sane behavior. Free markets in fact reward you with doing absurd things that fuck with prices to make your bag.
It is entirely the point of the free market that Micron can decide that selling all memory to only Anthropic is a better distribution of their resources and you can go pound sand if you can't find any memory any more.
So yes, monopolizing all silicon in the world and then demanding you pay them for using it is literally a free market.
Free markets trend torwards monopolies and other market failures without intervention excepting very specific markets that have genuinely mostly fungible products that are easy to sell, which we call commodities, and even those can in fact become failed markets like what once happened with onions.
If you think this can't be a free market because it's in a bad place for you personally, you don't understand market theory.
Free markets are also free to become "distorted" as you say.
I'm also not saying Claude can't have their own terms.
But when government and private enterprise meet, we have problems.
The government—supposedly acting as and agent of the people but largely acting in the name of a more nebulous "national defense"—has the power to kingmake private companies that can act outside the normal checks and balances of those people, and in a way that distorts the normal market dynamics that would otherwise give people the power to vote with their dollar.
In other words, we lose the vote on both sides.
> Free markets trend torwards monopolies
Where did you pick this up? In a perfect market you'd see fewer monopolies, not more. Monopolies occur when there is some other force undermining meaningful competition.
In some rare cases, that can be e.g. unique talent or culture, which prevents other talent from cohering well enough to compete. (E.g. pacifists make poor arms dealers.)
But usually it's a) resources (e.g. geography for some scarce material) or—far more likely—it's b) distortion due to government intervention, or worse, c) corrupt government intervention.
2. Which frontier AI leaders are demanding they are the only place to run inference?
2. I think that was OpenAI this time. But maybe it was Anthropic.
> if you haven't seen the whole ram supply thing…
1. I've read about RAM supply, but I've also actually taken a look at shops and silicon is still for sale, so I am not sure how the claim is defensible - how are you quantifying it? And for "all of the silicon in the world"? And how much for non-frontier AI, and how much silicon for non-AI? (For what it's worth, Google AI says the claim is false.)
> demand they be the only place to run inference
2. I searched but can't find such a quote from any company - perhaps the quote was made up by a site in order to push an anti-AI viewpoint? Or what is the exact quote you are referring to? (For what it's worth, Google AI also says that claim is false too.)
2. If I made broad claims here that you both believed to be untrue and you'd tried to research and the only stuff you found showed they were lies (and 6 comment levels later, a supporting quote had still not been provided), would you argue that showed I was arguing in good faith?
3. My parent comment even specifically allowed that when you said "all the silicon in the world" you may not have meant what you said, and instead you only meant one specific sub-type of silicon in one specific sub-area of the world. If we changed your claim from "all the silicon in the world" to "one specific sub-type of silicon in a small region of the world", would your claim then be true? If so, what kind and where?
4. Is the idea that pointing out where a broad claim may actually be untrue should not be done? Is there a specific better comment that you believe would have better responded to your original claims about "demand they be the only place to run inference" and "all the silicon in the world"? I am open to hearing the specific reply you suggest.
5. But here, let's go with the idea that 6 levels in we are still assuming there is no bad faith. What is the good faith basis / quote on top of which to view "demand they be the only place to run inference" as being true?
Anthropic has repeatedly shown it prioritizes pushing a set of values over building a general purpose tool.
Ironically, comments that reframe the issue as a legal one make the case for why regulating these companies. Else they can quietly impose their preferred ideology on users.
But then in the waning months of 2026, some inspired enthusiasts figured out how to run a model called Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on modest consumer hardware. It was comparable to Opus-4.6, and the first such model that could run efficiently on a GPU with just 16GB VRAM. This was the breaking point.
Next came Qwen4-Flash, which ran with similar efficiency but significantly higher capability, comparable to Opus-4.8. Going into 2027, ternary bonsai builds, n-gram offloading, and hybrid diffusion models brought even more capable models to modest consumer hardware.
By early 2028, TPUs and unified memory became standard in Apple and Lenovo laptop computers, and the vast majority of software development was now done with LLMs running locally on users' devices.
In the 2030s came the humanoid robots. By the end of the decade, for a cool $10k, one could have a trusted personal assistant that would cook and clean around the house, walk the dog, play with the children, even go to the gym for you. All running with onboard TPUs and local models.
Qwopus is a family of open-weight, reasoning-enhanced large language models developed by community fine-tuner Jackrong, designed to run efficiently on consumer hardware. The models are built on Alibaba’s Qwen3.5 or Qwen3.6 base architectures and are fine-tuned using Trace Inversion to distill the step-by-step reasoning chains of Anthropic’s Claude Opus (versions 4.6 and 4.7).[1]
[1] Just a brief Brave Search summary of what Qwopus is https://search.brave.com/search?q=what+is+qwopus%3F&source=w...
We don't have to imagine. Oracle's Java said you weren't allowed to use it in nuclear power plants. back in 1998. Naturally the number of people that were held back by that was a bit smaller, but the idea's not without precedence.
(subscription) service != tool.
It has the smell of an early stage religion.
hate to break it to you, but it already has been that for around a hundred years or so
It's a technology they wish to usher in their ideology.
"You can walk yourself you know?"
Telling people that they can write code by hand is like telling them that they can walk when their car doesn't drive, regardless of where you drive to. It's technically correct, but it is completely irrelevant.
Surely it depends on what I do with the results of the RE?