OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

I think that's fair. Interestingly enough, I now work for a company with Cursor, which makes it much easier to swap out models. I tried Claude Opus, GPT Sol and Grok for a review and planning task.

Even though I've been a Claude stan since like 2023, I was really, really impressed with GPT. It called out the over-complexity in the proposal really well, and gave recommendations that I preferred. Grok & Claude were mostly equivalent, which was interesting to me.

Certainly people have preferred tools. And if people argued with you about the merits of llms, that’s obviously a different thing.

I suspect if a third provider blew the two out of the water tomorrow with an amazing model, people would want to try it right away. Assuming the company wasn’t grinding up kittens to produce it, or something equally noxious.

RIP Anthropic "good guys" January 2021 - January 2026.

Earlier this year they limited how you could use your subscription. It's been rapidly downhill since then.

If we put your brain in a jar, would you be a person? Would you have normal consciousness? Honestly I don't know and I am not the person to ask.

But the brain is just a computer metaphor has flaws, particularly when you take account how poorly the brain is understood.

BENJY MOUSE Yes. To extract the question.

ARTHUR You can't have my brain. I'm using it.

FRANKY MOUSE Barely.

BENJY MOUSE We can replace it if you think it's important. An electronic brain maybe.

FRANKY MOUSE A simple one should suffice. Who would know the difference?

ARTHUR I would!

FRANKY MOUSE No, you wouldn't. We could program you not to.

If, as you were replacing neurons, you put them together in the same arrangement in the jar next door so you had 2 exact copes, which one is your brain?

At the exact point 50% of your neurons are copied, which one is your brain?

The best question is : does it matter?

These are similar to the contemplations that resulted in 'cogito ergo sum', being that all you can prove is that you have thoughts, so on some level, somewhere there is something having those thoughts : "I think, therefore I am"

The idea that we could have a silicon equivalent at all is already a huge assumption. For starters, the silicon equivalent cannot grow or kill neural connections or neurons as needed. Biological systems have a number of properties that silicon systems just don't at the moment.

8.3% of US households had low food security at some point in 2024 (read: had to resort to less varied diets like rice and beans, or visit a food pantry).

5.4% had very low food security at some point in 2024 (at least one family member had to disrupt their eating patterns and skip meals or eat less due to food availability).

Those numbers don’t overlap, it’s 13.7% experienced some variety of food insecurity.

It’s worse in families with children, 18.4% experienced some form of food insecurity. Thankfully, even in most households with very low food security the adults bear the brunt and make sure the kids eat enough, but in 0.9% of households even the children have very low food security.

Talking about welfare for AI models is utterly insane while those numbers are above 0%. I do not give a single shit about model welfare when we have human children skipping meals. Frankly it’s the inverse and if Anthropic has money to piss away on this then we should increase their tax rate and feed some kids, fix some roads, do some good. They can go look at model welfare after they’ve chucked us into the post-scarcity universe they keep telling us is 2 model releases away.

Everything is a conspiracy here.

This may be an odd reference, but I remember this song and dance with Roomba Vs. Roborock. "Roborock stole our IP!!!" but the problem was that song was slightly believable in the very early days, then Roborock started releasing products far better than anything Roomba had, but the tune in the US never changed. Literally for years after Roborock's products were two generations better than Roomba, but somehow they "stole" that?

China has money, talent, and cheap electricity/superior infrastructure. The US's big AI built their products on stolen copyright material and social media scraping. China likely got a catchup boost via distilling, but recently a lot of their AI ventures have come fully online, and they've just throwing tons of compute/power at the problem, and we're starting to see legitimately competitive products without shortcuts/cheating.

But the US won't change its tune; and that's convenient because they don't really want to compete, but rather roll out protectionism and fear per normal.

Z.ai found a way to crack/overcome the cryptography that safeguarded Claude/Fable's thinking tokens in Claude Code, so Z.ai had the ability to peak into decrypted thinking tokens that Fable produced in Claude Code. Z.ai also shared their findings with other big LLM companies like Moonshot AI, which had 20,000+ accounts speed running through Fable to get their hands on as many high quality thinking tokens as possible for distillation.

https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/...

https://x.com/alex_prompter/status/2079625670918046048

Like all rumors, who knows what's true or what's not.

edit: the Anthropic employee downvotes are coming in now. This was +8, now it's +3.

We’re already competing on distills—they exist. The question is whether America will actually compete or if it will lean into its populist tendency and cede the market globally to China.

Europe regulates to protect humanity.

USA regulates to protect monopolies and political power

Still, if feels very LLM-y with their short sentences, definitive statements and a love for lists when none is needed.

On the other hand, maybe Axios was such dominant component in the training dataset that now every LLM speaks like this...

It might mean we'll get cheaper cloud compute in the future, but I'm also positive on the market's ability to absorb the excess capacity quickly. It's Jervon's paradox.

"Then you're not pro self defense!"

We need to make sure only the chinese and criminals have that zero day button and western companies can't discover zero days in their own systems to protect themselves? Is that what you're getting at?

Some more very bad people are building them.

This democratizes that ability.

Might be good. Might be bad. Might be both.

Fuck you for thinking you know better than everyone else.

One wonders how many times that trick can be used. In fact, no need to wonder. Look around, the EU is busily spinning up arms industries, alternative payment platforms and expanding trade agreements with nearly everyone else.

Yes. The US can try. But while we haven't filed for divorce yet, we are definitely looking elsewhere.

It's wrong to hold the entire rest of the market and economy hostage to protect your investment.

If anything your “copyright forever” drumbeat and incorrect read of “only being trained on copyrighted works” are more hyperbolic than anything you’re responding to.

Also, the models from China are only being released open weights as competitive positioning against the globally more used competition. If the Chinese companies had a dominant market position they’d be falling prey to the same forces that have caused OpenAI and Anthropic to behave the way they do.

1. You're mischaracterizing and exaggerating the policies to falsely support your point. Things go into the public domain all the time: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/.

2. It's not like the model companies had the attitude "oh copyright is too long, we disagree on the term." Their attitude was precisely: "We want it and we don't give a fuck about you. Published yesterday, published 50 years ago? We will take it, we won't pay for it, and we will use it to replace you and make ourselves rich. Don't like it? Suck my data center."

You're describing what Pirate Party proponents have been championing since the start. Not that I disagree with that notion. Copyright law needs to be changed for modern times. But the laws as currently exist are what they are.

The question is whether people like Altman, Amodei, Musk are part of the common case in Hanlon's razor or they want to trigger emotional responses to gain agency in the mess.

You're doing the same thing:

> you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work

Actually, they said "The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation". The word "only" never appears here, nor is it really implied.

> you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place

This is pure "whataboutism". Both things can be bad.

I mean, you didn't address wealth inequality or global warning.

Not to mention that those nuances, as you state, mean very little. To say it was trained solely on copyrighted material or to say it was trained in large part on copyrighted material doesn't much move the needle over the fact it was done, a lot. Making a distinction between an "80 year old copyrighted work" or a recent one is also moot as it a matter of public record they themselves didn't make that distinction and happily fed on both kinds.

On to not being able to say they didn't ever do anything altruistic, well animal rights and welfare had great strides under the Nazi regime, not sure it evens out the rest. The same logic can be applied to the current state of affairs, doing a little good does not even out a lot of bad.

In closing, nuance is relevant when its relevant, after that its just being pedantic.

You’re not going sufficiently far back in comment histories (or using AI summaries of it from existing search tooling), or viewing the entire body of work I’ve written, shared, or discussed about all of those topics for the past twenty years.

I scream and wave my arms because nobody cared for decorum. I cut to the meat of the argument because nobody cares for context. Hell, this is the comments section for crying out loud; nobody is expecting a nuanced treatise about systemic interactions of multiple market and policy forces that resulted in this specific outcome in the comments section, even on HN.

Further, I suspect most folks here don’t actually care. I scream and wave my arms because it’s actually had the best results in outreach thus far - people see the flailing, read the bullet point, check the history, and somehow decide to reach out to me for more context (which I am always happy to give). When greeted with a wall of plaintext on an algorithmic site, the trained human response is to basically fuck off and go find a dopamine hit elsewhere, not stick around and read someone’s shoulda-been-a-blog-post on a social media comment page.

For all the crowing about “decorum” and “professionalism” and “intelligent debate”, the grim reality is that such concepts can actually detract from arguments by making it seem like we have time to discuss these further, that things aren’t that bad yet, that we can really think this through.

To which I say: no, we cannot. This language is a dire threat, it is a crimson red flag of intent to deliberately cause harm. You do not make an impassioned and polite argument about the nature of market forces or copyright policy with a mugger brandishing a gun, you do something about it.

For now, and into the future, I hope that we protect that unique and novel idea of an anthropomorphic mouse, which should be expanded to cover all forms of anthropomorphism, if we're being honest with ourselves.

And, to that point, the protection of that idea should also extend to the (clearly infringing) hit 90s YA book series Animorphs, as it somewhat sounds like anthropomorphism.

Protect their rights! Anything produced within the conceptual acreage that has been clearly marked and claimed is theft!

i was curious, because stego-tech also misrepresented the reason for their mod warning, and yours is the same.

you didnt get a warning because you were "discussing flock". its because you made a boring comment about "oligarch slushfund to pay bots" for "pro-flock astroturfing". that's not "discussing flock", its vague accusations of astroturfing.

its like, super duper clear in the guidelines that if you suspect astroturfing or botting that you should email the mods so they can investigate it.

dang has some pithy line about "mod less, not more when there is a relation to ycomb" and its true. ive ripped on flock plenty of times (fuck flock!). just put some actual substance in your comments.

Anything approaching nuance on other forums gets downvoted to oblivion and attacked if it doesn't fit the particular echo chamber it's in. That just reinforces the echo chamber. HN has to do quite a bit to preserve the culture and keep it from devolving into something like those other places.

Companies don’t have souls or minds. Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.

However, a half of century ago there were a non-negligible number of large companies for which there existed more important priorities than the financials, e.g. reputation and customer satisfaction, for instance Hewlett-Packard (which was something extremely different from those who have inherited this name).

You’re more likely to laugh at a comedian when everyone else does, even if you don’t get the joke.

Being an "AI inference middleman" is pretty lucrative, and AI companies have only started to crack down on it.

It was never the intent. What we are seeing is the methodology that Peter Thiel (hello, ycombinator) described in his book Zero to One [0]: "Competition is for losers"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One

Look, if I was worried about nuclear bombs, I wouldn’t work on a nuclear bomb developing research center.

It’s all fake and pompous garbage.

https://techandmedialaw.com/open-patent-rights-for-seatbelts...

(edit: sorry, re-reading your comment you were more directly referring to the AI companies and this context, I interpreted this more generally on my first glance)

Thinking that an actor in a system will go against the incentives of the system (at least at scale and over time) is naive.

It’s partly not arbitrarily punishing the naive unless they refuse to learn the lesson. Invite them in, acknowledging the error in judgement, and help them to be better going forward.

That’s how we win.

There are lots of Anthropic and OpenAI employees here.

There are also lots of people that totally hate AI here.

If they don't like your comment, some of them will flag you. I get caught up in this frequently. The flagging strongly correlates with the audience that the headline sentiment attracts.

In a thread like this that is laser-focused on real criticism of OpenAI and Anthropic you'll do just fine to call out their bad behavior.

The only country with anything to gain or lose here is the United States because it decided to play the game of market domination. Either it ends up with market domination and wins, or it doesnt and loses. China's result will remain what its set out to do, which is to create a technology that will support millions of small bespoke companies unbeholden to a larger firm serving all sectors of the economy.

OpenAI has the year-old GPT-OSS, and Anthropic has never released any open weights models. Meanwhile, other companies are delivering a steady stream of high-quality open weights models every month, and I'm not going to stop using them just because some other people don't like the country they were developed in.