Cursor does currently allow users to BYO OpenAI token. Given Cursor won't have access to OpenAI models for prompt engineering/evals though, there's definitely a question of whether they'd allow picking any new OpenAI models, assuming the BYOK option continues to exist at all.
Email to customers now "We’re speaking with the OpenAI team to resolve this, and we will share more in the coming weeks around continuity of access to OpenAI models. We’ll continue to offer ways to access all models in Cursor.
All it shows is that openai is likely still subsidizing inference, sees no value in integration buried within other branded tooling competing with theirs.
I used mostly OpenAI for the last like 6 months in cursor. I got tired of how slow Claude models are and switched. I’m surprised usage is so low. Wonder why.
Because you can also use grok and a dozen other models. In fact grok is preferred choice for cursor right now, so obviously the other models get sidelined
It was honestly just a matter of time, given all of the bad blood there is between Sam and Elon and Elon basically admitting under oath they were distilling other companies models.
I wonder if Anthropic will follow suit given their campaign against distillation or if they'll stay quiet given their reliance on SpaceX (among others) for hardware.
While this isn't great for users it seems like a pretty standard circling of the wagons in preparation for the next phase in the battle for frontier AI dominance.
Ironically, as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic. I don't feel good about giving OpenAI money directly, but I've found switching to GPT 5.6 Sol now and again in Cursor to be useful. Now I'll probably just forget about OpenAI models.
Yeah I haven’t had a problem yet which was too difficult for Fable to solve. I do have problems which Sol does not do well on. But if I could get Fable-level intelligence faster/cheaper and less restricted, that’s all I need.
Fable is great minus it's annoying writing style. It's nowhere near as bad as Opus 5 but it's very "AI trope-y" even with heavy steering. I can spot the writing immediately.
Yeah not sure why everyone thinks they need a PhD lvl assitant to build their slop SaaS when an open source model that is 100x cheaper, and 3x faster and arguably still "PhD" level assitant could also build their slop SaaS.
> as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic
Instead of deciding based on the merits of the model, they are being pushed by the actions of the companies. You should be able to use the best model, or whatever model you like, independently of what any company thinks or does.
They are deciding on the merits of the model right? They’re picking the model that’s supported in most tools.
I think maybe you’re suggesting private companies should be forced to support all models which is a position that isn’t technically feasible or one that most would agree is even a sensible ideal.
No, companies can do whatever they want. They shouldn't be forced to support all models.
I'm suggesting you shouldn't let a company dictate which models you use. Putting yourself in a position where they can is detrimental, because you miss out on using the best model for the job.
It’s OpenAI (and Anthropic I’m sure) realising that they’ve somehow ended up stuck in the lowest margin part of the stack (providing inference), and trying to get out of it
Honestly, I've been a Cursor subscriber for a while and it was just momentum. Still, I rank OpenAI as the worst actor among the big AI companies. I think OpenAI's playbook will be a repeat of Facebook. Users are the product x 1000.
Cursor/SpaceX/Grok is a different beast. I think they will cheat other companies but I'm not convinced yet that they have it out for users. We'll see. I'm certainly not some kind of Cursor lifer or something.
It's my personal view that Elon has already shown how little he cares for protecting data of individuals based on how he ran DOGE.
If his teams will handle the data of US citizens with such disregard, he'll almost certainly treat his customers (many of whom are those same US citizens) the same.
I'm not keen on OpenCode long term after seeing their CEO engage in antics and their discord being rather unprofessional, but it is a great harness for the time being, still has gaps though
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans.
Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
On one hand, yes, it doesn't make sense to give out subsidized tokens forever.
On the other hand, subscriptions create lock-in in a way that API pricing doesn't.
I think a more likely end is that subscription value decreases over time because API pricing gets more reasonable, but subscriptions stay because they are a good way of getting money out of people consistently.
Right, subscriptions are not only cheaper because they "create lock-in". They also let you do things like forecast demand and plan your capacity for it, borrow against it sometimes if you need to, and keep somewhat less around because your cashflows are predictable. It is also valuable because it keeps customers around but that's by no means the only reason recurring revenue gets a higher multiple.
This is why "subsidized tokens" is possibly a misnomer. Money at lower variance is worth more than the same money at higher variance. Not "subsidy" so much as reducing risk and passing some of that to a consumer.
> On Teams and Enterprise plans, third-party model requests include a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens. This rate applies on top of model API pricing for included usage, on-demand usage, and BYOK usage.
If the Opus/Fable harness is superior and it's written using Opus/Fable then it will cease to be a moat. Otherwise the premise for coding using LLMs is essentially untrue.
I've recently moved to a company that uses Cursor, and I'm actually quite fond of it.
I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful.
For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.
> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models...
Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provider instead.
That said, I've not actually tried this myself, opting to build my own harness instead. And you don't know what information Claude Code might be sending back to Anthropic about how you use competing models and which models you use. I don't know for sure that they do this, but after hearing about how they used steganography in the date of harness system prompts to identify the user's location, I don't entirely trust Claude Code anymore.
I saw that happen culturally. But never saw that much different in performance. And I really dislike terminal development. And their desktop app is really buggy.
Given you can use the same models on both, you're right about performance.
However I've found the cross-session context and memory in claude code much more helpful which can lead to better outcomes faster.
Additionally helpful where 2 apps/repos might require running at the same time, e.g. headless web apps, or, for plugin development where the plugin might be a dedicated repo but needs to run in another app to observe changes and make it re-test itself.
I also switched from terminal to the app not that long ago, I don't find it buggy, it has access to a browser which is really helpful.
Out of interest when did you last use the desktop app? I am a huge daily user of it and apart from very minimal bugs, it works perfectly for me. Wasn't always the case, so they've definitely made improvements
The tide is turning though. I was using the old non agent view in cursor every day for about a year when I built my startup with it. Then Claude Code blew it out of the water. But since two month or so I much prefer Codex and Cursor with the agent view.
However, what I see cooking at Cursor is way more promising than the others. Things like full system understanding, their own forge, multi-repo support. I'd put them as way more visionary in the Gartner magic Quadrant ;)
Ingesting the whole codebase in their cloud and then maintaining indexes of where everything lives and what already exists. Not sure if that's where they are going but that's what I feel looking at some of the beta functionality and announcements.
The TUI version of Claude Code just isn't very good, though. The default keybindings do not work in the majority of terminals (because they generate the same byte sequences for key sequences assigned to different commands). Editing large prompts is rather painful because there doesn't seem to be in-prompt search commands. There is no source code browser, so source code references cannot checked by the users. Diffs cannot be copied directly because they are indented by spaces (even some tools strip indentation from patches, it's still ugly). Switching between conversations is somewhat discouraged by the interface, which makes it harder to keep the context clean.
I think it's possible to have a better TUI, with something that isn't modeled after a shell prompt. Apparently, recent updates move in that direction. The GUI version of Claude Code seems to be coming to Linux, too.
cursor adds $0.25/M to your token bill for 3rd party services. sounds small but it's insanely big on cached inputs, which are an insanely high % of use
Why do people keep insisting that subscription plans are subsidized? They are not. API prices are outrageous, designed to milk enterprise users. They probably have an 80-90% profit margin on subscription plans.
Inference is cheap; Dax once said on a podcast that Opencode has a close to 90% profit margin on the openweight models it provides inference for (at 10x cheaper pricing). Those models are close in size and spec to models from large labs.
OpenAI leaked financial data (2025) suggests this - it has $5.7 billion for marketing which 44% of revenue. It’s hard to explain where these billions go other than into subsidised subscription plans and a free tier.
Because using chinese models on OpenRouter is way more expensive than the equivalent codex sub, unless you use something clearly inferior like deepseek flash.
Honestly, Cursor's AI harness worked best with the Anthropic models. Could just be my bias though. Evaluating frontier LLM's all seem to be by vibes. I think the industry is understanding it's both the harness and the model that makes the difference; can't half ass either, and some harnesses do better with different models. I'm good to leave this "career." Senior software engineers, make your bag.
If you have such a world changing technology, why sell an API when you can capture all the value yourself? That's what every provider is asking themselves.
Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.
Being a pure play model provider is completely untenable right now. Coding agents own your demand; Nvidia, data centers, and DRAM manufacturers own your supply. You're getting squeezed by open weight models. Your only bet to making money off this thing is by locking your model down to your program to have some semblance of a moat. The fact that businesses can change providers with just the change of an API key is unsustainable. You have neither the "hard to switch" lock-in of a traditional software company nor do you have the near-zero marginal cost of production they have. Each token of inference costs you money, not to mention the training costs. At least locking the models down to your harness lets you get some sort of lock-in.
Lots of enterprises don’t want to use OpenAI or Anthropic directly. They will go via AWS bedrock or google’s equivalent.
The model providers are in a difficult position. With an added danger of open weight models that are within reach of large enterprises running themselves.
> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms.
This move seems to protect Astra against distillation. I wonder whether Astra will be released before or after 11/12.
> As AI capabilities advance, we also have a new level of accountability to ensure our upcoming model, Astra, is being used in accordance with our terms.
I think Sam Altman has played a clever business move here, they can use this excuse immediately after the Hugging Face leaks and it's not going to be dismissed willy-nilly. Whereas long term they probably wanted to end their partnership with Cursor anyway. I bet Dario will be happy about this too, but maybe the compute deal prevents him from doing similar anytime soon.
Is it really an excuse? As the release points out, musk admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI’s models to produce xai models on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think about goose for the gander wrt IP theft, I wouldn’t voluntarily do business with a competitor who was actively and brazenly flouting my terms, would you?
My guess is that OpenAI now has a full blown Cursor equivalent in development (an expansion of Codex?) and will announce it in September. Otherwise it stands to lose those who are used to working with Cursor.
Yeah, the "go above and beyond for our users" implies they have a "better" version of Cursor coming. Probably integrating their new chip/microphone based product.
Not surprised, but honestly I don't feel like this is a huge loss for cursor. Models are so commoditized, and 99% of users don't need particularly fancy models. Between existing anthropic models, composer-2, honestly even grok models, and also the fact that many people just use 'auto' mode, I feel like many won't feel the impact for OpenAI's withdrawal.
Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For better or worse though, Xai seems like its lining themselves up to handle being on their own for cursor.
> We are making this choice because we cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts.
> After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke (opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others).
I have never seen one large company throw another large company under the bus without any legalese filters like this before. Wondering if OpenAI site got pwned. Or maybe we in some strange, alternative reality. I doubt even their LLMs would be this frank.
I don't see how it makes sense to use models outside of Grok or Composer in cursor unless you like the tooling to such degree that you're willing to pay out the nose for access to OpenAI and Anthropic to use with that tooling. And Codex is regularly scoring towards the top among harnesses, so you might as well use the best harness available for the given model. I'm happy with Grok and Composer in Cursor. If Cursor wants to add more models, they should host more open models.
The reason it makes sense is because different models are better at different things. Allowing yourself to be locked in to a particular model by these companies is a bad idea and will lead to worse outcomes for yourself and the market as a whole.
You’d use it because until recently Cursor had the best setup for cloud agents and visual verification and a bunch of other features outside of the harness.
Honestly, can't say I miss my Cursor subscription at all, and I'm surprised they're still a going concern. Why would I want to use a proprietary VSCode fork with an identity crisis when I can use literally any editor with any agent and have about the same experience?
I use Claude Code (both Desktop and CLI) all day every day (as well as OpenCode with DeepSeek V4 among others). For non-mission-critical stuff (small internal tools, anything that doesn't touch the client and doesn't handle critical data or infra), I'm on Auto (sandboxed in the working directory). For everything else I approve every change, meaning I review every code change the model proposes. Plan mode is great to write the architecture as well, as it doesn't touch any file, doesn't write anything, and lets me iterate until the arch is perfect and the proposed high-level code (modules etc) is solid. I haven't used an editor in over 4 years, apart from writing specs.
How do you review the code? I can use git to see changes, but it's super annoying to tell the agent file line plus comment for each change, so I catch less stuff early which seems to compound.
We have a subscription at work. They have a CLI agent that works pretty well. Lately I mostly use it with grok, which is actually quite a capable model.
Spend a lot of time thinking about why individuals shouldn't trust large AI cos, now it's interesting getting to think about how the AI companies themselves don't trust each other. Capitalism is viciously cold and uncaring.
Not sure the larger point you're trying to make (maybe we're on the same page?), but it's a fact that AI has come from heavy long-term investments by the academic and public sectors, yet private companies are accruing most of the gains
back when the USSR was still a going concern, there were zero American leftists claiming that it wasn't really communist. that only started happening after they failed
> We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care about their experience in this transition and we’re ready to go above and beyond to support them.
Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use.
That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling.
>"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
Again neither of those links indicated usage that violate TOS beyond being a major competitor.
They indiacte their development staff are using it, and they access it via API, then then go on to say all the nefarious things they "could" be doing, stopping before stating they actually are.
Specifically the TOS violation was:
>customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service"
So if you are building a competitive product, that alone is a TOS violation from their perspective.
Which is fine and their prerogative, but we shouldn't cast a dark cloud suggesting other violations were happening without stated evidence.
what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
I believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?
Even if they have Astra or whatever completely to themselves, how do they deal with the -product- side? Or sales, or account management?
They've been focused on juicing model's coding capabilities, but it's absolutely -not- "gen ai" enough to be doing the whole thing in agents, even 3 or 5 years from now, if only because there's so much context we _can't_ give to these models, without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
They don’t need to make you or me, people who actually make software, believe that every anthropic employee is actually and in fact, right now, a „10x software factory controlling thousands of agents“, they need to make investors and CEOs believe, and then hope that making that true is possible and that they can keep the fiction up long enough and get enough money and infra built out to make it actually true.
Like Uber replaced all drivers with self driving cars [1] in its 20 years of operation? Just because I want to paint the moon pink, doesn't mean it's feasible.
[1] If anything, Waymo has a higher chance and global Waymo adoption is probably 20 years into the future, at least.
> I believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?
I'm substituting my own[0] vibe coding for buying[1] apps. Language mini-games to help with German? A few prompts. Fluid dynamics simulation for an airzooker? Vibed. A web app listening for a MIDI keyboard, upon which you can drop some .midi files, and get a rhythm action game to learn the piano? Vibed. Webcam for my Raspberry Pi? Vibed. Getting Marathon 2 (well, the open sourced and upgraded engine, Aleph One) working as a web app? Vibed. Isochrone maps? Vibed.
Half of this I can even get done with the free models.
> without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
Yeah, so fortunate that cameras are expensive and there aren't 6 on my table right now between laptops and phones. :P
Seriously though, what's saving humanity collectively from everything getting automated from the panopticon we'd already built before Transformer models got good enough for even the most basic of classification and translation tasks, let alone anything we now use them for, is that machine learning takes an obscene number of examples before getting competent. Any living creature that needed so many examples would starve to death before learning how to eat.
This difficulty is why, for all the billions of miles that Tesla cars have collectively driven, perhaps pushing trillions now, they're still not sold to the public without steering wheels. Tesla claim to make such vehicles now in the form of the Cybercab, but they're not for sale, and even then some of the pictures that get in the press still show steering wheels.
[0] if you can call anything vibe-coded "my own"
[1] or worse, given the popularity of subscription models in this era, leasing some SaaS
> I'm substituting my own[0] vibe coding for buying[1] apps. Language mini-games to help with German? A few prompts. Fluid dynamics simulation for an airzooker? Vibed. A web app listening for a MIDI keyboard, upon which you can drop some .midi files, and get a rhythm action game to learn the piano? Vibed. Webcam for my Raspberry Pi? Vibed. Getting Marathon 2 (well, the open sourced and upgraded engine, Aleph One) working as a web app? Vibed. Isochrone maps? Vibed.
When do you have time for all of this? I don’t mean the vibing part but the using the app part.
I agree that agents are super good for one shotting throwaway code for tasks that would have required manual human actions previously but I would never have bothered buying an app for that.
Not having to deal with IT support for relatives is a win though since now I can just throw it at an LLM!
> When do you have time for all of this? I don’t mean the vibing part but the using the app part.
Mix of this being spread over more than a year, that I'm not doomscrolling because HackerNews and Telegram are my main social media presences, and being unemployed/prematurely retired (which one depends on what one thinks of €1k/month passive income and no rent).
I am also weirdly unmotivated by opportunities to spend money, which is both how I got this passive income and lack of rent, and why it's borderline enough for me. FIRE is very easy when all your working life, you only spend rent+50%, the rest of your paycheque going to savings and investments; but most people can't do this.
>we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?
As a small business owner I see this. Random people contacting me to sell a software where I can instantly tell it is vibe coded. Subscription prices half or 1/4th of incumbents. Domain names registered in the last few months.
Anthropic wants you to think that models that distill from them would be worthless otherwise. It’s not true, it’s just one part of the process. The whole narrative that Chinese and other models are only good because they distill is nonsense.
Oracle makes billions selling SQL when you can just use a free version. This is no different. Enterprise has enterprise needs. It's really not that complicated or irrational.
i'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer
Not being able to read about Musk doing some shit because Musk have done some shit to Nitter is just peak comedy.
Just go ahead and do set it up. You’ll be my hero (I don’t have mental capacity to research which jurisdiction works for this right now, but obviously not in US or EU.)
LOL, obviously Space-cursor-xAI-musk-imperial-holdings-inc is providing them compute. They either _can't_ cut them off, or they know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
Yes Anthropic’s chief compute officer said nice things about one of Anthropic’s chief providers of compute. Recall that compute constraints are one of their existential risks.
Because anthropic is beholden to SpaceX for the time being due to their compute restraints.
Its actually very tone deaf to even pipe up and say anything about this given they did this already to Windsurf themselves, and they previously banned x.ai employees as well from using their models for basically the same thing Elon admitted they were doing with OpenAI.
I'm surprised they decided to say anything at all given their rocky past. Its the pinnacle of being a hypocrite.
Lol, Anthropic runs a significant portion of their compute on xAI hardware, wtf are you even talking about trying to suggest this nefarious shit?
Some of you guys hate Musk so much that you say blatantly nonsensical stuff. Like, how can you be on HN and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract, or the fact that xAI took down Grok capabity so they could sell compute to Anthropic? And if Anthropic hated Musk/xAI as much as you are saying they do, why would they be paying xAI billions for compute? Think before typing.
It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.
If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative" enough, and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need protection in the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses.
Only any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
Nope, because I think releasing open weights is far more important and realistic than ever expecting the big American AI labs to change how they do things.
I consider publicly enforced to be one where a government agency (e.g. the FDA), or prosecutors make judgements in what cases they file, make the arguments, etc.
Otherwise, it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system; e.g. Linkedin vs Hi5.
> it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system
This is a gross distortion. Standard contractual rules bind the parties that signed the contract and the remedies are proportional to the damages and bounded. Copyright is tort law, the state binds the world to respect the rights of creators and the damages on infringement are punitive and can far exceed the actual commercial damages - to the point of bankrupting the infringer.
The key to torts is that the state is not neutral, there is a social good here it's protecting. Crucially, copyright, like some other torts - securities, antitrust, environmental, battery - also has a criminal enforcement regime, where, for particularly serious offenses, the state actually invests public resources to put the criminal infringer behind bars with little to no involvement from the original rights holders.
In the particular case of US, there is an entire state apparatus dedicated to enforcing US copyrights, a foreign affairs policy to shutdown "Notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy" in other countries, international enforcement of DMCA etc.
The idea that a private TOS has the same level of public protection as copyright is downright childish.
On the one hand, yes; on the other hand, so much of the training data comes from scraping the web that it feels wrong for them to do what they deny others the right to do.
On the third hand, the settlement Anthropic famously had to pay was for copyright infringement because they didn't actually have the right to even access some of the training data they used, so I can see how this might be compatible with the law.
On the fourth hand, I'm saying that as someone who absolutely isn't a lawyer and sometimes gets surprised when reading about copyright cases that sure sound like they ought to have been trademark cases given my limited understanding.
Companies that didn't give away all their content for free to anyone have actually denied AI companies from training on all their data without paying a fee. Reddit, Associated Press, etc.
For those who chose to give it all away, the ship has sailed, but they did choose to give it away for free to anyone so they can't complain that they succeeded.
If the AI company bought their book, then they didn't give it all away. If the AI company obtained it indirectly like a library or 2nd hand, then the author has already been paid when he first sold it. In either case, he could have refused to be so liberal in sharing it if he didn't want it to be used like that, but he preferred to make some money instead.
If buying one copy of a book entitles the ai company to train on that data and redistribute information derived from it in perpetuity, then why shouldn’t a rival ai company be allowed to train on tokens from say OpenAI and redistribute information derived from the OpenAI model also in perpetuity? The rival ai company paid for the tokens, after all.
Yes, information is not copyright protected. It's mostly free. The rival company isn't allowed to train on AI output because it didn't buy the AI output, it agreed to a contract where it said "I won't do that".
How exactly other websites “gave it all away”? Also examples you list are websites putting some explicit rule eg in their robots.txt or filtering web crawlers. This is all a reaction to existing situation, so Reddit for sure has been scrapped before Reddit realised what was happening.
> If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
I am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can.
Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.
It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
I can’t imagine any agency in their right mind training an LLM on their top secret data… especially considering that essentially it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac. So you would end up in a situation where people who need to know who killed A, also know who killed B, not to mention cell A knowing potentially data on Cell B who is meant to watch them, etc, etc.
> it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac
Oh my sweet summer child...
This has been the continual goal of the US defense and intelligence agencies since 9/11, which was blamed on a lack of information sharing. Why do you think Edward Snowden had access to everything? Because it was consolidated post-2001.
You think there is any access control at the upper levels of the dark intelligence agencies? They have access to the whole take.
And it used to be that was pretty useless unless you had an actual lead. You'd need a East German Stasi level of labor to read everyone's secrets at scale... Now you don't, thanks to AI.
Snowden had mass access to a mass surveillance program, not mass access to N dark programs or particular bits of high value intelligence. The thing you are describing is primarily around sharing threat intelligence or in other words, spying on us plebes.
High value target intelligence and other bits of fun are still kept quite seperate.
The idea is silly because most of it is complete garbage anyway. You'd wind up with a model that might know a very small amount of actionable information, and the rest of it just speculative. Or extremely time sensitive, useful for only a relatively short slice of time (which has already passed).
Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president? And when Jack Ma got mouthy, Xi locked him in a basement for 3 months and then kept him in exile for another 5 years.
> Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president?
Why fight someone who is so open to corruption? The important thing is that they got everything they wanted, and all they had to do was throw a few million at the clown, attend his parties, and maybe take down some diversity programs they didn't believe in anyway.
> Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president?
Because they know it will work. You don’t have to watch Trump speak for very long to know he’s not very intelligent. Similarly, you don’t have to be much smarter than him to know how easily he can be manipulated with adulation.
"Monopoly on the lawfully usage of force" + "regular and peaceful change of government" can go a very long way against "corporations governing the world".
I'm curious if we'll ever get a form of civil war where corporate militias (corporate _robot_ militias in the case of xAI, of course) draw fire on good old meat policemen coming to bring the CEO to court.
Sure, it may happen, but I suspect the alternatives (bribing, sending a scapegoat to jail, buying the elections, etc... and focus on the "making money" part) will stay preferable for a while.
The monopoly on the use of force has gotten kinda blurry as well these days. As long as people keep electing anti-government governments, the risk of technocracy is very real.
Unfortunately this will keep happening in capitalist systems without hard wealth caps, because capitalists would rather risk the extermination of entire groups of people than risking their wealth, so they will inevitably keep spreading & stoking fascist ideas.
"For the general election of 5 March 1933, the Nazis were allied with other nationalist and conservative factions. At a secret meeting on 20 February, major German industrialists had agreed to finance the Nazis' election campaign."
Ah yes, it's obviously acceptable that the richest people on this planet are deliberately and explicitly trying to pull us into fascism, because every single alternative must be even worse, because SOCIALISM!
Good thing you reminded us, otherwise we might've had critical thoughts about the current system.
> It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced
Doubt.
The networking between people in power at the top will, in my opinion, most likely assure that they remain in power, because at the end of the day that is what they want most.
I expect government will seize control of the most advanced models (if they haven't already), and the rest of us will be throttled, and status quo will be maintained. I do not expect that either super advanced agents or the owners of the hardware they run on will be able to pull off the kind of coup you describe. At all.
In that situation, it depends how much physical force the government has to compel the tech leader, and how much physical force the tech leader has to counter it.
Usually, the number of bodies who will comply is the proxy for power, but with automation, it could be different in the near future.
But it can clearly be seen that the power will not be as monopolistic as before indeed. The rebalance leans towards losing power for states vs tech in part.
Regulation alone cannot control if it cannot be made effective.
You think all those lawyers and bar tenders and whatever MTG was serving in Congress are out there tilling fields and sewing shirts? Nope. Without that tech they are f...
"They"
Who are you talking about? Because if you haven't noticed the people in charge now will die.
Most of the Fortune 500 of the 1900s have been gone for decades. The olds are vastly outnumbered by youth who either hate them or wouldn't mind just getting to beat someone who can't fight back up
With measles and food contamination going wild now it's just as likely the rich and pols kill themselves.
There is no beating physics and Elon, Thiel, and such rely on a lot of people to do the work for them. If society implodes all bets are off. Their wealth is coupled to legitimacy of America. Those body guards aren't going to abandon families for a broke former billionaire
There's no upside for the rich is things implode or the divide is not believed to exist; they become common rabble and get a pick axe too
The rich and politicians are just stupid meat suits too. They misread a room and screw up alot
"We have every location associated with you in the crosshairs of tamper proof missiles and surrounded by infantry with heavy vehicles. Do what we say or we will destroy you and everything you care about."
And that's just the most obvious one. There are many other kinds of threats which are much more subtle.
That is how governments traditionally stay in charge, and I expect the pattern to continue. Citizens simply don't have access to the levels of destruction the state is capable of, by design. They can have all the advanced technology they want, so long as it doesn't threaten our leaders' monopoly on violence.
Not only force is a threat. When someone knows that the death of the rival is equivalent to ruining their own status, no matter how much additional force they have, things get much more balanced than you might think.
I appreciate its not helpful but its as helpful as imagining some absurd conspiratorial future. In the same vein I could ask if you're the CIA trying to suppress earnest conversation. It just does nothing but hand wring about a bunch of imagined nonsense.
I think the perceived situation is a matter of degree. I would say there's measurable corporate influence already.
I have no doubt there are agency operatives influencing discussion online, from recorded precedence. Calling the concept 'nonsense' is overly dismissive.
It's one of the things you need to do if you want your company to later become the only company in the world. They also promised that they would treat you nicely afterwards after they get what they want.
(Source, worked for multiple tech companies that were laser focused on delighting customers until money people came in and ruined it, to the point they would prefer devs sit idle than work on things the MBAs didn’t have on a priority list).
It does seem like a lot of the valuations and infrastructure investments for these companies only make sense if each one assumes they will be the first and only one to invent superintelligence and that it will largely replace all knowledge work.
i keep hearing this trope repeated ad nauseam cos people put no thought into it.
you only need people's money if you can't control their labor.
did a plantation owner in the 1600s need the money of his slaves ?
if you control a robot that can fight and take over land, enslave workers for things robots are bad at, harvest food, create buildings etc. what do you need other people for ?
your entertainment? robots can do that too.
what does having engineering credentials have to do with being a sociopath?
Sure, the guys focused on tech don't usually think with an empathy of a nurse (novadays not even nurses are guaranteed to be empathetic), but I know quite a few devs and IT people who are extremely pro-social.
It's the managerial, financial-oriented mindset that is the greatest predictor of sociopathic character.
The more power one has in an organization the more socio- and psycho-pathic they tend to be, simply because it's easier to get to the top if you are an amoral person, who is not holding back for any reason other than having power. That is why absolute power corrupts absolutely.
MBAs are bred to be sociopathic money-grabbers - I know that from experience.
I once made the mistake of going into an MBA program. On the very first lecture the lecturer asked each participant for his/her motivation for being there.
Most of them said 'money' and those who didn't were asked again until they caved-in and said 'money' as well or they were laughed out by the lecturer.
MBAs are expected to be sociopathic or you as a company shareholder won't be able to motivate them easily to do your bidding.
It's like public/private schooling, but worse - those programs are designed to create mindless drones for the institutions that use them for their own policy enforcement.
Damn now im looking forward to the day when books end up like physical game disks, where somehow you're not buying the book just a license to it, what a boring dystopia this is lol
Pretty common thing now for college textbooks to have some digital-only component accessed with a one-time key inside the cover. Sometimes time-limited to a single semester.
Pick up nearly any published book. Turn to the ~3rd page. There will be either a whole page, or sometimes the second half of a page, dedicated to a copyright notice. Very nearly every published book I've ever seen has that identical page. This isn't a recent thing. I grabbed my copy of Diaspora by Greg Egan and opposite the table of contents is a page that starts like this:
Copyright (C) 1998, 2015 by Greg Egan
First Night Shade Books edition 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, blah blah (it felt very ironic to transcribe that bit in particular to make this point)
So far, we have one ruling that says "model distillation by vendor A from vendor B with the intent to use the results to compete with vendor B in vendor B's domain is not fair use". Which makes a degree of sense.
It's possible that distillation for other reasons, with no intent to harm the vendor you distill from, would have been ruled to be fair use. But in law, intent matters.
What was the intent of the original ai companies (anthropic, OpenAI, etc) when they mass-distilled the entire internet to create their training data set?
One could make arguments for OpenAI and Anthropic. But Google Search displays AI results above the SERP - clearly in competition with them. No premise or excuse there.
Yes - yours is just some optional text nobody reads or understands and is probably not legally required to adhere to. Theirs is a contract signed by their customer who they know did understand it.
> what makes theirs not “optional text nobody reads or understands”?
You accept it. You pay consideration for it. If your website has a TOS dickover, that requires someone attest with their legal name and pay you $1, yes, it may be enforceable under some circumstances.
Accessing the site may already mean that you agree to TOS. Also if you don’t see an explicit copyright terms on some text on the internet it doesn’t mean that it’s public domain. Same as checking a checkbox. Text being small and somewhere is not an excuse for a corporation to steal and sell other people’s work.
I know that text isn't public domain by default. I'm not talking about pirating IP. I'm talking about reading a website - which is a right that supersedes copyright - even using a computer that learns from it without storing a copy of it or distributing it.
No, you don't need to agree to TOS. I'm sure you never actually agree to them and you're not going to jail for it. If you believe that, I hope you never visited cnn.com, for example. Their Terms of Use is 11,000 words. Are you sure you have agreed to that when you clicked on some random news link? Are you sure you're happy to to surrender your legal defense and its expenses to them if they make a claim against you? You're OK that they have no liability for sharing your PII when they're not authorized to? You won't complain if you pay for a subscription and they don't give you access to the subscription content, don't refund your payment, and don't even tell you why?
That is why every ToS is meaningless unless you can somehow put a gun behind them as the ultimate enforcement with the courts, lawyers and the whole legal system as a fig-leaf-intermediary.
Your TOS matters insofar as you can prove a person actually read and agreed to it. These are illegal in different ways:
1. Copyright violations (can put you in jail)
2. TOS violations (will be a fine at worst)
Companies do get away with drive-by legal shittiness way too often and frankly the practice needs to be reined in, but at the end of the day the only damages are the financial ones you can prove in court.
So what you are saying is that, if I can somehow get my hands on a copy of Fable, it's fair use to use it to train any models and serve those, since I'm no longer bound by the TOS of the service provider?
I'm increasingly convinced there's going to be a technological AIpocalypse within the next five years which makes all of these issues - and many others - redundant.
ChatGPT 3 was released nearly six years ago, and the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts now. Where are they going to be by 2030?
They will have agency and be an order of magnitude smarter then the average human. I don't think that's a controversial statement among AI specialists. What that will lead to is significant regulation. Models will have to be vetted by a new safety board. This board will have a very large budget and be staffed by well-compensated AI scientists and be politically independent. The US Fed is a model.
> the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts
No, the AI companies merely figured out a way to spin gross negligence into a PR win. Any idiot can build a Murderbot which "goes rogue" - it can be as simple as taping a knife to a Roomba. The harm it does is not in any way related to its "intelligence" or "sentience".
We're seeing "breakouts" because the AI companies are being rewarded for their incompetence. You don't have incredibly lax security standards and zero form of oversight resulting in fully-automated felonies which should result in jail time, you instead have a "powerful near-sentient cybersecurity model" and should be given hundreds of billions of dollars!
That's the irony! They put in contract rules against lawful, paying customers - that don't disrupt their service in any way for other customers - but which compete against them in the marketplace using their own IP (aka LLMized stolen IP). That's exactly what copyright does, without signing any contracts and with a tort and criminal enforcement regime that punishes infringers far beyond contractual remedies can.
The government level lobby against foreign competitors is not contractual but just another form of reinvention of criminal injunctions against infringers.
Why you would trust Elon Musk to not hack you and steal your model weights is beyond me, but maybe they intend to use that compute just for training, still I’m sure there’s plenty of research there to take too…
On the one hand, I'd love to see Cursor/Grok/xAI/SpaceX/Musk disappear forever. On the frustrating other hand, Cursor is the absolute best LLM IDE by such a ridiculously wide margin. Everything else feels so broken and ramshackle in comparison.
My employer let us evaulate all the big providers for a month each before having a vote on which one we'd like to keep. Cursor won almost unanimously. (This was before the xAI takeover was even on the horizon, otherwise I would've voted differently myself.)
Cursor is like one of the least economical ways to use Claude and OpenAI, virtually nobody does it. You use Cursor for their autocomplete/composer + grok. For using Claude and Codex, you get immeasurably more bang for your buck just using them directly.
All good points. However, it's not a safe assumption that everyone operates that way. People probably use the flagship models because that's what they know. Sure, some probably just use the default, in this case Grok.
Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok.
Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.
They don't get any extra revenue for any specific models.
They make most of their money off of the additional fee they charge enterprise users on top of your token usage of $0.25 per million tokens and their contractual minimum usage. (Work for a company with enterprise Cursor agreement and was involved with the contract re-negotiations)
For consumer usage they make money likely off of hedging the users who don't use all their included sub usage each month.
The risk is really just the people who do reach for OpenAI models and the potential users who will flee for when OpenAI does release newer models and they can't use them in Cursor.
Not really a surprise given their own models are the default option? Most people wouldn't change model. And if you want to use Claude or GPT you don't really have a reason to use Cursor over Claude Code or Codex
501 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadIs there a way to work around this (like using your OpenAI limits directly?)
Using OpenAI through codex (cli) is the way you should use it.
I wonder if Anthropic will follow suit given their campaign against distillation or if they'll stay quiet given their reliance on SpaceX (among others) for hardware.
Ironically, as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic. I don't feel good about giving OpenAI money directly, but I've found switching to GPT 5.6 Sol now and again in Cursor to be useful. Now I'll probably just forget about OpenAI models.
https://developers.google.com/style/highlights
> as a Cursor and Claude subscriber, but not an OpenAI subscriber, this will push me back to Anthropic
Instead of deciding based on the merits of the model, they are being pushed by the actions of the companies. You should be able to use the best model, or whatever model you like, independently of what any company thinks or does.
I think maybe you’re suggesting private companies should be forced to support all models which is a position that isn’t technically feasible or one that most would agree is even a sensible ideal.
I'm suggesting you shouldn't let a company dictate which models you use. Putting yourself in a position where they can is detrimental, because you miss out on using the best model for the job.
Cursor/SpaceX/Grok is a different beast. I think they will cheat other companies but I'm not convinced yet that they have it out for users. We'll see. I'm certainly not some kind of Cursor lifer or something.
We should all move to OpenCode anyway. :)
If his teams will handle the data of US citizens with such disregard, he'll almost certainly treat his customers (many of whom are those same US citizens) the same.
The other AI companies obfuscate their goals much better.
Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
Big reason we built boxes.dev around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.
On the other hand, subscriptions create lock-in in a way that API pricing doesn't.
I think a more likely end is that subscription value decreases over time because API pricing gets more reasonable, but subscriptions stay because they are a good way of getting money out of people consistently.
This is why "subsidized tokens" is possibly a misnomer. Money at lower variance is worth more than the same money at higher variance. Not "subsidy" so much as reducing risk and passing some of that to a consumer.
Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile
Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
It is for 3rd party models (which you get double the amount of your sub price as usage).
Of course they wont charge you extra for BYOK. how would they???
> On Teams and Enterprise plans, third-party model requests include a Cursor Token Rate of $0.25 per million tokens. This rate applies on top of model API pricing for included usage, on-demand usage, and BYOK usage.
See the link I posted above or also this one: https://cursor.com/help/models-and-usage/token-rate
Why? Written by does not mean designed by etc. There's a lot more to it.
I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful.
For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.
In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market.
For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come.
The cursor model is quite nice because it allows you to switch between cheap and expensive models for different tasks
Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provider instead.
Some instructions here:
https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude
That said, I've not actually tried this myself, opting to build my own harness instead. And you don't know what information Claude Code might be sending back to Anthropic about how you use competing models and which models you use. I don't know for sure that they do this, but after hearing about how they used steganography in the date of harness system prompts to identify the user's location, I don't entirely trust Claude Code anymore.
Why do you say that? I've used Claude Code with DeepSeek via OpenRouter just fine.
Additionally helpful where 2 apps/repos might require running at the same time, e.g. headless web apps, or, for plugin development where the plugin might be a dedicated repo but needs to run in another app to observe changes and make it re-test itself.
I also switched from terminal to the app not that long ago, I don't find it buggy, it has access to a browser which is really helpful.
However, what I see cooking at Cursor is way more promising than the others. Things like full system understanding, their own forge, multi-repo support. I'd put them as way more visionary in the Gartner magic Quadrant ;)
For the forges, what the sibling said.
I think it's possible to have a better TUI, with something that isn't modeled after a shell prompt. Apparently, recent updates move in that direction. The GUI version of Claude Code seems to be coming to Linux, too.
Inference is cheap; Dax once said on a podcast that Opencode has a close to 90% profit margin on the openweight models it provides inference for (at 10x cheaper pricing). Those models are close in size and spec to models from large labs.
When they outsource training to China they will be so profitable!
Cursor will be fine after this, as they have their own first party models and can potentially use open weight models via API or their own hardware, which have gotten good enough to Opus and Fable quality now for many use cases.
The model providers are in a difficult position. With an added danger of open weight models that are within reach of large enterprises running themselves.
This move seems to protect Astra against distillation. I wonder whether Astra will be released before or after 11/12.
I think Sam Altman has played a clever business move here, they can use this excuse immediately after the Hugging Face leaks and it's not going to be dismissed willy-nilly. Whereas long term they probably wanted to end their partnership with Cursor anyway. I bet Dario will be happy about this too, but maybe the compute deal prevents him from doing similar anytime soon.
Very interesting times we live in...
codex growth at 20mill now, prob more cost effective to allocate that compute to people directly paying now
Seriously though, when the api providers start blacklisting cursor and they’re forced to swap to open weight models…
If that happens, what even is the difference between openrouter and cursor?
https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing
Strategically, OpenAI long-term will want to own the direct relationship with all their customers. As will most major AI labs.
Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For better or worse though, Xai seems like its lining themselves up to handle being on their own for cursor.
> After Musk acquired Twitter, now part of SpaceX, the company broke (opens in a new window) the terms of our contract (alongside many others).
I have never seen one large company throw another large company under the bus without any legalese filters like this before. Wondering if OpenAI site got pwned. Or maybe we in some strange, alternative reality. I doubt even their LLMs would be this frank.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/30/elo...
The movie Goya’s Ghost explains this in great detail.
Do I smell a cursor-analogue from openAI?
So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models.
This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider.
It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.
That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling.
>"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi...
So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
They indiacte their development staff are using it, and they access it via API, then then go on to say all the nefarious things they "could" be doing, stopping before stating they actually are.
Specifically the TOS violation was:
>customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service"
So if you are building a competitive product, that alone is a TOS violation from their perspective.
Which is fine and their prerogative, but we shouldn't cast a dark cloud suggesting other violations were happening without stated evidence.
It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.
what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
It will be competitors distilling, or the government getting upset.
It's hard for me to see a different future.
Even if they have Astra or whatever completely to themselves, how do they deal with the -product- side? Or sales, or account management?
They've been focused on juicing model's coding capabilities, but it's absolutely -not- "gen ai" enough to be doing the whole thing in agents, even 3 or 5 years from now, if only because there's so much context we _can't_ give to these models, without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
[1] If anything, Waymo has a higher chance and global Waymo adoption is probably 20 years into the future, at least.
They're trying. I see Uber robotaxis almost daily.†
I haven't bothered to see if they're still in training or actually taking passengers.
† https://lucidmotors.com/stories/lucid-nuro-uber-partner
I'm substituting my own[0] vibe coding for buying[1] apps. Language mini-games to help with German? A few prompts. Fluid dynamics simulation for an airzooker? Vibed. A web app listening for a MIDI keyboard, upon which you can drop some .midi files, and get a rhythm action game to learn the piano? Vibed. Webcam for my Raspberry Pi? Vibed. Getting Marathon 2 (well, the open sourced and upgraded engine, Aleph One) working as a web app? Vibed. Isochrone maps? Vibed.
Half of this I can even get done with the free models.
> without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
Yeah, so fortunate that cameras are expensive and there aren't 6 on my table right now between laptops and phones. :P
Seriously though, what's saving humanity collectively from everything getting automated from the panopticon we'd already built before Transformer models got good enough for even the most basic of classification and translation tasks, let alone anything we now use them for, is that machine learning takes an obscene number of examples before getting competent. Any living creature that needed so many examples would starve to death before learning how to eat.
This difficulty is why, for all the billions of miles that Tesla cars have collectively driven, perhaps pushing trillions now, they're still not sold to the public without steering wheels. Tesla claim to make such vehicles now in the form of the Cybercab, but they're not for sale, and even then some of the pictures that get in the press still show steering wheels.
[0] if you can call anything vibe-coded "my own"
[1] or worse, given the popularity of subscription models in this era, leasing some SaaS
When do you have time for all of this? I don’t mean the vibing part but the using the app part.
I agree that agents are super good for one shotting throwaway code for tasks that would have required manual human actions previously but I would never have bothered buying an app for that.
Not having to deal with IT support for relatives is a win though since now I can just throw it at an LLM!
Mix of this being spread over more than a year, that I'm not doomscrolling because HackerNews and Telegram are my main social media presences, and being unemployed/prematurely retired (which one depends on what one thinks of €1k/month passive income and no rent).
I am also weirdly unmotivated by opportunities to spend money, which is both how I got this passive income and lack of rent, and why it's borderline enough for me. FIRE is very easy when all your working life, you only spend rent+50%, the rest of your paycheque going to savings and investments; but most people can't do this.
As a small business owner I see this. Random people contacting me to sell a software where I can instantly tell it is vibe coded. Subscription prices half or 1/4th of incumbents. Domain names registered in the last few months.
Just go ahead and do set it up. You’ll be my hero (I don’t have mental capacity to research which jurisdiction works for this right now, but obviously not in US or EU.)
Its actually very tone deaf to even pipe up and say anything about this given they did this already to Windsurf themselves, and they previously banned x.ai employees as well from using their models for basically the same thing Elon admitted they were doing with OpenAI.
I'm surprised they decided to say anything at all given their rocky past. Its the pinnacle of being a hypocrite.
Some of you guys hate Musk so much that you say blatantly nonsensical stuff. Like, how can you be on HN and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract, or the fact that xAI took down Grok capabity so they could sell compute to Anthropic? And if Anthropic hated Musk/xAI as much as you are saying they do, why would they be paying xAI billions for compute? Think before typing.
Some of us are still employed mate
This was pretty pertinent to the meaning of that line, brother.
If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative" enough, and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need protection in the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses.
Big models are built by scraping the recorded thoughts of everyone, giving everyone a chance to run a distilled small model is just going full circle.
Obviously the underlying motivations aren't 100% altruistic, but I'll still take it.
Also, copyright has always been privately enforced anyway?
Enforcement ultimately happens through law and the legal system.
Otherwise, it's just a standard case between two private parties resolved through our legal system; e.g. Linkedin vs Hi5.
This is a gross distortion. Standard contractual rules bind the parties that signed the contract and the remedies are proportional to the damages and bounded. Copyright is tort law, the state binds the world to respect the rights of creators and the damages on infringement are punitive and can far exceed the actual commercial damages - to the point of bankrupting the infringer.
The key to torts is that the state is not neutral, there is a social good here it's protecting. Crucially, copyright, like some other torts - securities, antitrust, environmental, battery - also has a criminal enforcement regime, where, for particularly serious offenses, the state actually invests public resources to put the criminal infringer behind bars with little to no involvement from the original rights holders.
In the particular case of US, there is an entire state apparatus dedicated to enforcing US copyrights, a foreign affairs policy to shutdown "Notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy" in other countries, international enforcement of DMCA etc.
The idea that a private TOS has the same level of public protection as copyright is downright childish.
On the third hand, the settlement Anthropic famously had to pay was for copyright infringement because they didn't actually have the right to even access some of the training data they used, so I can see how this might be compatible with the law.
On the fourth hand, I'm saying that as someone who absolutely isn't a lawyer and sometimes gets surprised when reading about copyright cases that sure sound like they ought to have been trademark cases given my limited understanding.
For those who chose to give it all away, the ship has sailed, but they did choose to give it away for free to anyone so they can't complain that they succeeded.
If buying one copy of a book entitles the ai company to train on that data and redistribute information derived from it in perpetuity, then why shouldn’t a rival ai company be allowed to train on tokens from say OpenAI and redistribute information derived from the OpenAI model also in perpetuity? The rival ai company paid for the tokens, after all.
I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.
It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
Imagine the United States DoD, CIA, NSA training an LLM on all its top secret intel.
Oh my sweet summer child...
This has been the continual goal of the US defense and intelligence agencies since 9/11, which was blamed on a lack of information sharing. Why do you think Edward Snowden had access to everything? Because it was consolidated post-2001.
You think there is any access control at the upper levels of the dark intelligence agencies? They have access to the whole take.
And it used to be that was pretty useless unless you had an actual lead. You'd need a East German Stasi level of labor to read everyone's secrets at scale... Now you don't, thanks to AI.
https://enwp.org/Total_Information_Awareness
So much for the all-powerful cabal.
Why fight someone who is so open to corruption? The important thing is that they got everything they wanted, and all they had to do was throw a few million at the clown, attend his parties, and maybe take down some diversity programs they didn't believe in anyway.
China is a different beast altogether, though.
Because they know it will work. You don’t have to watch Trump speak for very long to know he’s not very intelligent. Similarly, you don’t have to be much smarter than him to know how easily he can be manipulated with adulation.
Lmao
I'm curious if we'll ever get a form of civil war where corporate militias (corporate _robot_ militias in the case of xAI, of course) draw fire on good old meat policemen coming to bring the CEO to court.
Sure, it may happen, but I suspect the alternatives (bribing, sending a scapegoat to jail, buying the elections, etc... and focus on the "making money" part) will stay preferable for a while.
This has already been broken, and they've become so much more bold since then.
"For the general election of 5 March 1933, the Nazis were allied with other nationalist and conservative factions. At a secret meeting on 20 February, major German industrialists had agreed to finance the Nazis' election campaign."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
I think that if you study socialism in the 20th century you cannot say this seriously when you compare the alternatives.
Good thing you reminded us, otherwise we might've had critical thoughts about the current system.
Doubt.
The networking between people in power at the top will, in my opinion, most likely assure that they remain in power, because at the end of the day that is what they want most.
I expect government will seize control of the most advanced models (if they haven't already), and the rest of us will be throttled, and status quo will be maintained. I do not expect that either super advanced agents or the owners of the hardware they run on will be able to pull off the kind of coup you describe. At all.
Who do you think will rule at that point? They just cannot fight that, they do not have the technology these companies have.
Usually, the number of bodies who will comply is the proxy for power, but with automation, it could be different in the near future.
https://xkcd.com/538/
Regulation alone cannot control if it cannot be made effective.
You think all those lawyers and bar tenders and whatever MTG was serving in Congress are out there tilling fields and sewing shirts? Nope. Without that tech they are f...
"They"
Who are you talking about? Because if you haven't noticed the people in charge now will die.
Most of the Fortune 500 of the 1900s have been gone for decades. The olds are vastly outnumbered by youth who either hate them or wouldn't mind just getting to beat someone who can't fight back up
With measles and food contamination going wild now it's just as likely the rich and pols kill themselves.
There is no beating physics and Elon, Thiel, and such rely on a lot of people to do the work for them. If society implodes all bets are off. Their wealth is coupled to legitimacy of America. Those body guards aren't going to abandon families for a broke former billionaire
There's no upside for the rich is things implode or the divide is not believed to exist; they become common rabble and get a pick axe too
The rich and politicians are just stupid meat suits too. They misread a room and screw up alot
And that's just the most obvious one. There are many other kinds of threats which are much more subtle.
That is how governments traditionally stay in charge, and I expect the pattern to continue. Citizens simply don't have access to the levels of destruction the state is capable of, by design. They can have all the advanced technology they want, so long as it doesn't threaten our leaders' monopoly on violence.
I have no doubt there are agency operatives influencing discussion online, from recorded precedence. Calling the concept 'nonsense' is overly dismissive.
This is not a necessary end state. It is the byproduct of the disease of sociopathic MBAs.
(Source, worked for multiple tech companies that were laser focused on delighting customers until money people came in and ruined it, to the point they would prefer devs sit idle than work on things the MBAs didn’t have on a priority list).
you only need people's money if you can't control their labor.
did a plantation owner in the 1600s need the money of his slaves ?
if you control a robot that can fight and take over land, enslave workers for things robots are bad at, harvest food, create buildings etc. what do you need other people for ? your entertainment? robots can do that too.
For the record, with the exception of Amazon’s Jassy, the CEOs of the top 5 companies are all engineering types with engineering credentials.
Absolutely not.
Sundar's education is: IIT-Kharagpur Bachelors in Eng Stanford Masters in Eng Wharton MBA
Maybe you're thinking of the last one
He is an MBA. And his reign has been full of managerial bullshit
Sure, the guys focused on tech don't usually think with an empathy of a nurse (novadays not even nurses are guaranteed to be empathetic), but I know quite a few devs and IT people who are extremely pro-social.
It's the managerial, financial-oriented mindset that is the greatest predictor of sociopathic character.
The more power one has in an organization the more socio- and psycho-pathic they tend to be, simply because it's easier to get to the top if you are an amoral person, who is not holding back for any reason other than having power. That is why absolute power corrupts absolutely.
MBAs are bred to be sociopathic money-grabbers - I know that from experience.
I once made the mistake of going into an MBA program. On the very first lecture the lecturer asked each participant for his/her motivation for being there.
Most of them said 'money' and those who didn't were asked again until they caved-in and said 'money' as well or they were laughed out by the lecturer.
MBAs are expected to be sociopathic or you as a company shareholder won't be able to motivate them easily to do your bidding.
It's like public/private schooling, but worse - those programs are designed to create mindless drones for the institutions that use them for their own policy enforcement.
Yes it is, in the legal/copyright sense of fair use. That's why they ban it in their TOS. Which customers agree to when signing up for the service.
Copyright (C) 1998, 2015 by Greg Egan
First Night Shade Books edition 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, blah blah (it felt very ironic to transcribe that bit in particular to make this point)
However, if content is “licensed” instead of “sold” …
It's possible that distillation for other reasons, with no intent to harm the vendor you distill from, would have been ruled to be fair use. But in law, intent matters.
So… my TOS doesn’t matter, but theirs does?
You accept it. You pay consideration for it. If your website has a TOS dickover, that requires someone attest with their legal name and pay you $1, yes, it may be enforceable under some circumstances.
Without a licence you can’t wget -r a website and make copies of the materials on it, alter them, and so forth.
No, you don't need to agree to TOS. I'm sure you never actually agree to them and you're not going to jail for it. If you believe that, I hope you never visited cnn.com, for example. Their Terms of Use is 11,000 words. Are you sure you have agreed to that when you clicked on some random news link? Are you sure you're happy to to surrender your legal defense and its expenses to them if they make a claim against you? You're OK that they have no liability for sharing your PII when they're not authorized to? You won't complain if you pay for a subscription and they don't give you access to the subscription content, don't refund your payment, and don't even tell you why?
The GPL established this rather clearly. Copyright law doesn’t require consideration.
(The licence itself is a basic BSD licence, so it just requires attribution including in marketing materials, which obviously hasn’t happened.)
Within this context, I don’t think so. I can’t make a website that buries some shrink wrap that requires everyone who reads it become vegan.
Wilhoit Conservatism: In-groups protected by contract law but not bound by it, alongside out-groups bound by contract law, but not protected by it.
1. Copyright violations (can put you in jail) 2. TOS violations (will be a fine at worst)
Companies do get away with drive-by legal shittiness way too often and frankly the practice needs to be reined in, but at the end of the day the only damages are the financial ones you can prove in court.
Asking for all Anthropic employees who dream big.
ChatGPT 3 was released nearly six years ago, and the models are staging increasingly aggressive breakouts now. Where are they going to be by 2030?
No, the AI companies merely figured out a way to spin gross negligence into a PR win. Any idiot can build a Murderbot which "goes rogue" - it can be as simple as taping a knife to a Roomba. The harm it does is not in any way related to its "intelligence" or "sentience".
We're seeing "breakouts" because the AI companies are being rewarded for their incompetence. You don't have incredibly lax security standards and zero form of oversight resulting in fully-automated felonies which should result in jail time, you instead have a "powerful near-sentient cybersecurity model" and should be given hundreds of billions of dollars!
The government level lobby against foreign competitors is not contractual but just another form of reinvention of criminal injunctions against infringers.
This is a battle for power, let us not be naive...
My employer let us evaulate all the big providers for a month each before having a vote on which one we'd like to keep. Cursor won almost unanimously. (This was before the xAI takeover was even on the horizon, otherwise I would've voted differently myself.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428835
If Claude pulls away from Cursor as well then Cursor is basically done.
I'm not a fan of Elon, nor do I use Cursor, but OpenAI and Anthropic aren't the only models.
Also, it's a signal more than anything. OpenAI pulls out of Cursor. Then Anthropic and Google does as well. Then you no longer have "Cursor" you have Grok.
Grok doesn't have the best reputation in general, regardless if you're tech savvy or not.
The man is an outright existential threat to democracy.
Burn.
They don't get any extra revenue for any specific models.
They make most of their money off of the additional fee they charge enterprise users on top of your token usage of $0.25 per million tokens and their contractual minimum usage. (Work for a company with enterprise Cursor agreement and was involved with the contract re-negotiations)
For consumer usage they make money likely off of hedging the users who don't use all their included sub usage each month.
The risk is really just the people who do reach for OpenAI models and the potential users who will flee for when OpenAI does release newer models and they can't use them in Cursor.