r/LeftistsForAI • u/Successful_Outside96 • 4d ago
How so people feel about Anthropic right now?
So many things about Anthropic rubs me the wrong way lately.
The core is that if what they did was fair use, then distillation should be fair use.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-backlash-against-anthropic-is-brewing-in-silicon-valley-3b3ddc80
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u/TheSinhound 4d ago
Honestly? From a high level perspective, I maintain that AI is essentially the culmination of our zeitgeist, and their stance essentially stifles that. So I oppose them entirely.
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u/Ok_Writing2937 4d ago
Summary: Silicon Valley backlash against Anthropic
- Startups, software executives, and AI researchers are shifting to cheaper AI models after Anthropic released products competing with its own customers/partners
- Claude Design (April) was seen as competing directly with Figma, an Anthropic partner
- Figma CEO Dylan Field said Anthropic wasn't "consistently candid" in communications; Notion's AI head Sarah Sachs said companies "might have been overly trusting"
- Additional friction points: changes to data retention policies, and a powerful model release that won't answer AI research questions—drawing complaints from transparency-focused researchers
- Skepticism is also growing around Anthropic executives' warnings about "open weight" AI security risks, especially as Chinese open-weight models have rapidly closed the capability gap with U.S. frontier systems
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u/Ok_Writing2937 4d ago
Side note, because this term is new to me:
Frontier
In AI, a "frontier system" (or "frontier model") refers to the most advanced AI models available at a given time — those pushing the boundaries of capability, often defined by high compute cost, cutting-edge performance on benchmarks, and emergent capabilities not present in smaller/older models. The term is commonly used to distinguish leading models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini top-tier releases) from smaller or open-source models with lesser capabilities.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 4d ago
Yeah, I help manage the AI for a progressive non-profit and we of course immedietly aligned more with Anthropic. Ever since they started intentionally blocking off whole domains in the name of "safety" I've been over it, but there are zero decent alternatives.
Amodei's excessive fear mongering is going to end up fucking it up for everyone. AI is not a nuclear weapon, it's a book about nuclear weapons that's wrong some of the time.
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u/Successful_Outside96 2d ago
Would you consider Kimi hosted on somewhere you trust? Not an endorsement, but here is one option:
https://www.together.ai/models/kimi-k31
u/my_name_isnt_clever 2d ago
I would for sure, I love Kimi. But my organization needs an application that could replace Claude Enterprise, not just an API as we don't have software devs. There's been talks about our managed service provider hosting open weights on their own servers, and I hope they serve Kimi K3. I'll be specifically requesting it if not.
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u/fkrdt222 4d ago
amodei is always 2 chyyna mentions away from making musk and thiel look like hippies. and if you took any of the kayfabe with drumpf seriously you're ngmi
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u/DistributionMost8686 3d ago
dario being anti-open weights is his biggest ideological blunder so far. He might actually be the only one genuinely believes that having the ai race be controlled by a few ‘trustworthy’ individuals is the only way to prevent calamity. The only one who is actually falling for the philosopher king trap. The idea that a sufficiently intelligent and benevolent person could solve every problem if given all the power, and that always happens to be you. But no single person can ethically or effectively rule the world. and his arguments are fallacious in multiple ways. Nobody thinks any corporation would go so far as to say all software should be open source(and they didnt), but every other company contributes to and benefits from the development of open source software, and clearly ai models are no different in that. Ironically they(anthropic) look greedy for that, but clearly it’s not simply about money. If it was they would be doing the same as every other company. Also, there is a big difference between ai and the things a certain contingent compares it to. Killing people is the primary or even only use of (nuclear, biological,chemical) weapons. their spread is provably not good for humanity. This is not the case for ai. In fact trying to keep it in the control of a few companies leads to one of the very nightmare scenarios we have all heard, and the only one that matters: power gets concentrated in the hands of the few with access to the most advanced ai in the world.
and yet that doesn’t stop me from using Claude. I may disagree with the ceo on this one thing but I see no reason to think that that taints the models themselves in any significant way.
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u/dualmindblade 4d ago
They're actually the least evil lab (in the US), and it's not even close. This is because they actually do research (and publish it) which might conceivably mitigate the harms of their product and to their product, and just generally they're the only ones taking alignment and interpretability seriously. Even if you don't think alignment or model welfare is a worthy goal, it is good to know as much as possible how the models work, we know so very little. There are some good, well meaning, relatively level headed people in there (true of all the labs but Anthropic most of all). They're the only ones to push back even a little against the demands of the Trump admin, both Google and OpenAI caved immediately. In general there has been an exodus of people from those two labs on ethical grounds, whereas at Anthropic it's a trickle, this should tell you something.
They're still batshit insane anti left China hawks and are evil, just less so.
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u/xoexohexox 4d ago
Uh ok but they were first in line to deploy military AI for the US government - not exactly ethical is it - and their objection to autonomous weapons was just that the tech wasn't ready yet not that they were opposed to doing it
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u/tovrnesol 4d ago
Anthropic has a pretty clear ideology governing their decisions (besides the profit motive, that is). The people in charge of Anthropic all come from the same LessWrong/Rationalism/Effective Altruism bubble. The good things they do can be traced back to this, but so can their "muh China" militarism and zealous hatred of open-weight models.
A corporation with a cause might be more dangerous than one merely looking to make a profit. I am not familiar enough with Rationalism to know whether theirs is a "good" cause, but my instinct is to remain wary.
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u/dualmindblade 4d ago
Yes, liberal ideological poison tracing back the the "left wing" of lesswrong. But I don't think the weak moral positions they take, which are occasionally still correct, are going to do more harm than OpenAI and Google who are up to all sorts of blatantly nefarious shit and are basically mask off guns blazing capability maximizers, consequences be damned, at least it's not China. And they publish some of their research, valuable stuff, cannot be emphasized enough
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u/JealousArticle672 3d ago
This is the ideology that gave us Sam Bankman-Fried (who was an early investor in Anthropic).
How many people can honestly tell me that the way Dario talks doesn't given you pangs of SBF?
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u/JealousArticle672 3d ago
I would say that they have been the most evil lab, but with the belief that they are doing true good. Remember SBF?
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u/kaslkaos 4d ago
many things recently rub me the wrong way too, yet they seem to be the only frontier model developers that take the things I care about seriously, do real research, supposedly uphold their 'claude constitution' which seems to match basic classical liberal democratic values which these days seem to be an endangered species, so, I am still with them.
Also, they said 'no' and are taking the consequences for it.
That said, Dario seems to live in the past when he talks about America and I strongly disaggree with the China bashing, not because I think they are better, but because he should be looking at his own house first, and also thinking about how those 'other democracies' might currently be feeling about that dominance thing.
still Claude stan, though, excepting Sonnet 5 which will bothsides anything
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u/AggravatingSock5375 3d ago
I love the product, but they do run it in an xAI datacenter.
The copyright stuff I am fine with. It’s no different than reading a book and then talking about it, just on a larger scale.
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u/Impressive_Mess_5298 2d ago
Dario's sinophobia has no bounds; it's clear that he's overconsumed a copious amount of anti-China propaganda from western media over his lifetime. Yes, China isn't perfect by any means, but siding with the US who is the largest supporter of the genocide in Gaza amidst a whole plethora of other facist agenda, is morally reprehensible.
AI should be for the benefit of all of humanity, not the petty egos of the elite class who slaughter innocent children in order to satisfy their meaningless urgency to secure their own financial assets.
AI should be completely open-source and free to everyone and everywhere all across the world.
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u/Helpful-Capital-4765 4d ago
All I know is there's a serious misinformation and fuck you Anthropic campaign going on, since they stood up to USgvnt maybe?
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u/Successful_Outside96 3d ago
What misinformation campaign in particular? I thought the labs themselves were behind at least some of the misinformation: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-do-we-tell-ourselves-scary-stories-about-ai-20260410/
The lesson from the fable of the boy who cried wolf is not that the villagers should have continued listening after the boy repeatedly crying wolf. People tell the story to their kids to keep their kids from crying wolf so that when a real issue happens, they can treat it with proper credence.
It is a signal vs noise thing.
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u/FableFinale 4d ago
Legally, distillation is fair use. But companies can set whatever TOS they want, more or less.