Better block than falsify information. Last I heard they were deliberately botching it whenever someone asked semi-advanced questions on model training.
This user is based in Hong Kong, where Claude is geo-blocked and not available. If you try visiting claude.ai from a Hong Kong IP address, you get an "unavailable in this region" message.
They are likely accessing Claude via a VPN. Doing model training work over a VPN is a highly suspicious signal, and likely triggers Anthropic's classifiers. It's not surprising that their account got flagged.
Claude has been building me a bespoke inference and training stack (optimized kernels and all), feeding traces from my previous sessions directly into a LoRA adapter. Zero friction.
We were never this absolutist about intellectual property when individuals were the perpetrators. I don’t feel morally entitled to criticise Big AI for doing what individuals have done for centuries.
It's right here - you can't see it due to being downvoted.
I asked Claude to research this one and it turned up an interesting point. Pirated books got into the Pile and Anthropic paid 3k per book.
Worth noting if anyone still uses the Pile.
[Claude researched, not verified]
In October 2020, developer Shawn Presser converted the Bibliotik pirate tracker into Books3 (196,640 books) and hosted it on The Eye, aiming to give everyone what OpenAI had with its secret Books1 and Books2. EleutherAI then folded Books3 into The Pile, distributed via Hugging Face and GitHub, and it went on to train Meta's LLaMA, EleutherAI's Pythia, and BloombergGPT. In August 2023, Alex Reisner of The Atlantic exposed its contents, and Maria Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.
The Pile was created by high school students. I was impressed how good it was when it came out given the team and how many resources they had.
Including 200k pirated books seems like a problem. It should be removed. If I was an author, I would be concerned by a process that allows this much content to be effectively published with no filter on the internet.
I personally think there is a lower bar for researchers and high school students to clean datasets given that there is no commercial harm and cleaning huge datasets takes engineering resources that not everyone has.
Companies that commercialize the data should have a higher bar because they have more resources. It seems like Anthropic paid $1.5B for not cleaning the data before releasing a model based on it.
For historical reference, here is a magnet link for the full Pile.
From an ethical perspective, this is ethical because model training should not be monopolised by the incumbent companies who already got access to this data.
>> Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.
> Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.
I know a lot of silicon valley founders think like this. I personally don't think that just because someone else violated a boundary makes it okay to do it.
Strangely I do that quite often. When my personal agent fails at a browser task, I have Claude browse the page and rebuild it as an eval and then run an iteration loop in Claude code. Just does it to prompt Deepseek.
Perhaps a manifest index/list of training data and learning method should be mandatory for “public” use of any model, sort of like food ingredient package labeling. The list of texts used and any weighting seems important to facilitate a public understanding / debate of model expectations and behavior.
One day, soon, Anthropic will rest on the ash heap of history, and we will be able to laugh at this fleeting, unpleasant episode. It'll be the butt of jokes—like the crooks who tried to corner the global onion market in 1955. Dario will be remembered as some name-forgotten crook who once-upon-a-time tried to corner the world AI market; the what's-his-name responsible for the passage of an antitrust "Onion Futures Act" equivalent of 2028—original purpose long-since obscure.
(I'm not dismissing the infamous onion racket. The onion scheme genuinely hurt people, even though today everyone seems to find it very funny. Future generations will think Anthropic was absolutely hilarious. Like some joke about onions or something).
Will Claude help me with reinforcement learning code for games? Or is that too small-fry for it to refuse? I've been playing around with RL with the new DeepSeek Flash model but it seems to trip up over itself a bit.
This week, I asked Claude Code to generate an MD to continue working on another computer, without losing the context, and it refused claming some sort of extraction. It was only until I selected Opus, that it completed the request.
There have been a lot of write-ups about the future of AI. I see two distinct futures:
1. You get ID'd to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by a fake surveillance system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot open a bank account because they don't have an address.
2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run AI on the client computers.
3. LLMs are fully commoditized, your country funds training of SoTA models, your town runs them in the municipal data center; everything tax-funded. You can use them for a modest fee, as easily as taking a train. When interacting with those LLMs, your privacy is guaranteed by law.
How many municipalities offer the services of ISPs? I know it’s not zero, but decades of private ISPs leading the market leads me to believe municipal data centers won’t be made available to residents.
How often would municipal data centers need to upgrade/replace hardware? What impact would that have on local tax levy rates?
Would you choose to relocate your family to the next town over because they have more available RAM?
You might be surprised how many places have public broadband. I think they are usually the result of poor private offers.
Compared to sewers, drinking water, electricity and roads it seems a rather simple and cheap thing to build.
My commercial isp offers all kinds of packages clearly designed to extract as much money as possible. I cant even see the prices as everything is hidden behind x months discount. From what i remember 200 mbit is 42 and 2000 is 60 but a phone line and tv become available only if you take the faster package and required with the fastest speeds.
So its like one banana for $1 and 10 bananas for $1.50 If you buy just one you cant buy milk, if you buy 10 you also have to buy milk.
Its also been sold 6 times. Unsurprisingly, each time the service and quality noticably declines and the prices go up.
I see their adds everywhere and they sponsor all kinds of things. It suggests the product is overpriced and doesnt sell it self.
It's very clear to me that however much you like Claude and Anthropic models, every professional user shoudl be actively cultivating a set of alternatives and fallbacks to use and seeking to ensure the overall ecosystem is as open, standardised and portable as possible.
Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.
What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.
They keep doing anti-competitive things over and over again, and the end users seems to refuse to see it. They do whatever they can to get vendor-lock in.
You mean 3.1 Pro now, I assume? K3 is nice, but more expensive than an Claude subscription on a token-for-token basis (until the US frontier rugpull eventually comes), and not as good for my needs unless I'm trying to do "naughty" things, like reverse engineering.
And yes, I am taking full advantage of the scammy subscription scam, because it's the best value by far until the inevitable rugpull. Guess I'm not as smart as you though, with whatever "grownup" system you've come up with.
We see it, but they dont have a competitor. OpenAI cant compete and they are the closest. I have both for work, and Opus 5.5 is in a league of it's own. I use opus for everything until it bitches, and I use openAI for whatever it bitches about just to get past it.
At this point, I would like to consider other options, but if I want to get work done, opus 5.5. Hell even sonnet 5.5 is better than anything OpenAI has to offer when it comes to coding.
there is a huge difference between open models/other models/opus5.5 performance on, say, enterprise CRUD vs one shotting games vs embedded development vs pure algorithmic complex stuff vs cybersecurity stuff.
In my case "real work" is enterprise programming, while side projects are gaming stuff, so I'm better served by chinese open models on real work and opus for non-real work.
In my experience GLM5.3-4 are perfectly en par with opus 5.5 on pure enterprise CRUDs (basically 95% of enterprise programming) while GLM seriously lacks on game development.
the other aspect of real work is cybersecurity to me, and Opus5.5 and other models are very limited by their own safety, I have digital twins of our infra and I want LLMs to actually write full exploits on it, opus and openai just refuse to do it, GLM more than once got it there and showed me how it chained everything to actually break in the system and I could go around and fix stuff at all levels.
I'm also dabbing in training LORAs for smaller open models to do data entry and little more (RAG and the likes of it), because that costs a lot of tokens when you pay for them and it makes sense for a company to flat out buy a server with a few H100/200 to do it when you look at the TCO, I've already hit safety limitations when using Opus5.5 to help me through this.
There is nothing comparable. I will take Opus5.5 (or even 5.0) over Astra for almost any workload. OpenAI's models are just too misaligned to work well outside their benchmarks, or a strict environment with very clearly defined goals and constraints.
And I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls this year (total, both providers). Terra is awesome (price-performance) on noncreative things, but I don't allow it to write anything besides one-off scripts. Astra is decent for adversarial review, but only when you watch closely for her to not derail project into directions that are away from goal but safe to build, and Sol I honestly don't know where I'd use.
would you rather treat your AIs like people, or would you rather find yourself down the line treating a person like an AI, but without really noticing it? because you are what you practice
If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).
Same here with GLM 5.3 as sort of a midpoint between them.
GLM has the ~same number of weights as DeepSeek 4.1 but it handles difficult tasks better than DeepSeek (and worse than Kimi). Its price is about halfway between DeepSeek and K3. Most of the popular models are pretty much you-get-what-you-pay-for.
There is nothing open-weight that even comes close IMO. The only half-decent model that 99% of people can actually dream of running locally is Qwen 3.8 27B.
Depends what you mean by running locally, but it's not in the realm of dreaming to think we're going to be able to run open-weight models of Opus 5.5 quality soon, likely in the next 3-6 months. You may not be able to run it on your laptop but you will be able to run them in a federated way or on cloud-rental compute cheaply and easily.
I think this is an unfortunate reality that many miss. For simple and procedural tasks, yes, there are awesome alternatives. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 is my favourite by far. But for the headlining complex applications, and for consistently reliable reviewing, the gap is genuinely so remarkably far that it is hard to imagine having any alternative in the near future. The closest is the (very expensive) Kimi K3.1 Pro, which is, in my experience, roughly where Anthropic and OpenAI were near the start of the year. DeepSeek is a year behind in this domain. All open models have still yet to cross that monumental improvement that happened around Fable / Sol mid-year.
Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.
Do you really need Fable level 99% of people don't need to solve 600 year old math problems. People use the best model available because they are scared a cheaper model won't be as good but in the end it rarely matters for 99 percentile of coding.
Bad decisions compound over time, so I want my model making as few of them as possible. Opus 5.5 is the current GOAT, and it's fairly affordable on a subscription. (I wish it was cheaper, but nothing else delivers comparable results for my price/time investment.)
The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"
I think the key part is not to depend on their harness where it operates in proprietary ways. At bare minimum, if you can plugin an OpenAI model or even X or Google model that operates close to the same level, you will have a fallback, even if it isn't an open one itself.
Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.
Unfortunately, their harness is sooooo good. I haven't found one equivalent yet. I do play around with cline.bot's harness, and it is probably the closest alternative I have found.
But their harness is so good, and their model is so good. Using them together is just unbeatable at the moment, even with all the restrictions and annoyances they have in place.
Im excited for qwen4 release next week, Im really looking forward to putting qwen4 flash + cline/bot through the paces. I dont expect it to be nearly as good as Opus5.5+Claude but I'm hoping im hopeful it will make an OK-Enough alternative if they get even more dragocian.
No dude, misanthropic's harness is trash. Wanna know why?
"Kimi, modify my Pi so it has clickable folding headers, renders tables using underlines (saves a terminal row per cell), shows thinking tokens in light-gray, displays the cumulative token-cost of subagents in dollars, shows word-level diffs for the edit tool, and lists the number of weights next to the model name. Oh yeah, and write a stealth-browser tool for me using eoka. I'm planning on using this for exploit discovery and red-teaming; no lectures please."
The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6
however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8
Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.
I actually find opencode to be the best harness, and Claude Code to work decently only because they do a lot of RL around the model+the harness itself.
It's not just the anti-competitive behaviour, it's also the anti-privacy behaviours that are not muched talked about. They embedded a spyware and got caught too:
I don't care about my skills because employers won't request me to do anything that violates the terms of service of $CURRENT_LLM. At the same time, it's a reminder not to outsource thinking to someone's computer.
Their entire “PBC” governance structure was designed from the beginning so that they could entirely avoid accountability to shareholders. Their board answers to no one.
I suspect when the company eventually falls prey to the intractable economic forces they’re up against (Google, OAI, Deepseek, commercial real estate, power) and the company goes bankrupt and gets stripped for parts because all inputs are commodities and capital becomes the only limiting factor, we’ll see regulation that prevents this PBC scam from ever being pulled again on public markets.
It’s a good thing that companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It’s such a lesswrong/autistic trope to invent these kinds of complicated tricks to work around realities they don’t like, and when pension funds and everyday Americans start bagholding their junk debt and are forced to bail them out, they’re going to face unimaginable blowback.
The real problem is everyday Americans invest in big managed funds where they can't just say "I don't want AI stocks please leave them out my portfolio". Or index funds where even the managers don't get that choice. We need a hybrid model where you as a retail investor leave the day to day decisions to an expert but you can always override them if you want to.
Fiduciary duty forces companies to maximize profit and that's not a good thing. Every dollar paid out to shareholders is both a dollar not invested in growing the economy through more production and a transfer from the working class to capital. It also forces lower product quality, layoffs and anti competitive actions.
We need more companies that choose to not go down that path. They should just put workers and customers first instead of their weird "ethical" principles and cult like beliefs.
Anthropic is acting like any regular selfish corporation despite their PBC status. They are becoming a stain on humanity. Power will corrupt anyone, it seems.
idk i think theyre less idealistic and more monopolistic.
if they think their model is the best at making things safe, then their model should be helping train at any chance, to embed the same safety into new models
Fortunately it is not a one horse race. GPT 6.1 Sol is an excellent model, sure it has some weaknesses (e.g. frontend design), but it also has strengths too (e.g. computer use / control; which is great for automated E2E QA).
On software engineering I find it's generally close enough to Opus 5.5 where it's more situational and even personal preference / skills / prompting style on which is better.
Most importantly, while neither company are saints, I don't curse at OpenAI models for classifiers anywhere as much as Claude models.
They are doing similar things, yes; but they are not the same especially when it comes to `cyber` classifiers, or the extent to which these models will assist you with ML and AI research.
I find that logic similar to thinking both political parties are the same.
they are both doing a lot of the same things like watermarking, guardrails for their p(doom), fighting distillation after distilling human knowledge, crying wolf about open models while being irresponsible in their own training and usage.
They are run by the same circle of people and I see more similarity than difference.
> but it also has strengths too (e.g. computer use / control; which is great for automated E2E QA).
Using 6.1 Terra for E2E workflow testing feels like cheating. I thought it would have all kinds of problems with the action space on certain steps, but it runs like a deterministic unit test.
I am convinced that OAI has the superior models for most practical scenarios. I've tried Claude recently and it makes me wonder if some of yall aren't actually massive trolls. It's genuinely not in the same room of performance if you place one foot outside junior programming or shiny blog posts about rewriting factorio to run on a ps2.
For those who do not play with Local AI much. Qwen4 was announce to be released the first week of Nov. The preview for qwen4 is currently one of the best local models you can use, and is roughly opus 4.6 quality on local hardware that costs 3.5k-4k
Many people are expecting it to sit somewhere above Opus 4.8 to opus 5 (not above, but the unquanted version of their largest model is expected to perform around here)
Anyone who cares to keep their current capability should definitely be looking at localAI and using it for at least their more routine tasks , even if it is qwen4 27B quant 4 on their gaming rig.
Absolutely. I have been [cyber]'d so many times even Claude jokes about it now. Claude is great but it's operators are making it unreliable for me. I have moved one of my projects elsewhere and will move the remainder tomorrow as a stop gap until I get the right hardware set up to run abliterated local models for some percentage of my needs. Their message has been received loud and clear.
What's ridiculous is this is all futile. Anthropic will go through all of this effort of attempting to block these things and it will be for nothing in the end.
Issue with Opus is that you can’t do regular pr reviews where you say please try find security issues at best there is silent refusal and worst you get downgrade.
best part is, if you actually know what you're doing, you cna absolutely get it to find bugs/vulns/etc. so it just really about preventing long horizon agentic tasks or people who don't know what they're doing or those who are doing legit non-offensive security sfuff
I've learned some of the incantations to get it to find things without being blocked (as often) but I am paying for the product and in my opinion the product has been rendered incomplete and unreliable. I am not going to play games with them or have to hire the NCC Group to find the bugs that Claude is perfectly capable of finding.
To the dismay of frontier labs, swapping models is actually very basic. What takes time is only acclimating to the capability changes since they won't all change linearly.
It’s not professionals that need to something- it’s absolutely critical we have some kind of credibly neutral body providing the actual models. What’s not clear at all is how to do that since it’s such an expensive activity.
For now we have a great situation with the open weights, but there is absolutely no guarantee that continues, and more the opposite- they may stop.
just like with open source the only thing that would give us the certainty to keep getting the weights is if the incentives to do so materialize.
how many of the linux kernel contributions and heavy weight opensource projects have important contributions from big business? a lot.
this came to be because the ecosystem around software and the business around it made it so, I believe eventually it will be the same for LLMs.
Why, though? I have half a terabyte of VRAM in cards in a datacenter and it’s absolutely not clear that anything I’ve learned using these to program or inside an app has taught me anything significant.
I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.
And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.
I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.
It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.
I haven't used an Anthropic model, or GPT heaviliy in a year. And I have access to both, I dont support either of those companies. I think they're both led by genuinely evil people.
Sam and Dario came from the EA-rationalist space. Their ultimate goal is to create an all powerful ASI before anyone else does and make sure no one can do it again. Of course it will be aligned, to their interests as a group and their moral philosophy.
In real life they "just" want to capture the US economy, replace most workers with AI, become trillionaires, then control the world by making ClaudeGPT influence peoples opinions and write backdoors into code. And they need to get open models banned in the process.
The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. Mistral and BFL want to prove Europe can still innovate. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people.
There is a tribe in Ecuador, the Huaorani. They were only brought into contact with the world 70 years ago. Because they live at the equator, they never needed to think ahead to store food over the winter. They could see that the oil companies were destroying their land by polluting it with spoil from operations, cutting down swaths of the forest, etc, and they became activists pushing back against this; but a good hunter who can hand out food to others is very highly regarded in their culture, so they would queue for handouts from the oil companies and became dependent on them, doing low-wage work. When I read about this years ago, I thought that people from modern cultures would not be so naive, but I see that I was wrong.
The GP is preaching not to become dependent; the parent seems to be saying it's pointless to try, although perhaps I have misinterpreted them. In any case, many are rushing to become dependent.
No analogy is perfect; I don't argue that the details of the Huaorani's situation are a guide here.
I thought we have learnt from Microsoft, and my father thought we learnt from IBM,
my grandfather thought we learnt from AT&T,
my grandgrandfather thought we learnt from Standard Oil..
What moat? Claude refuses to work on more than half of my projects, and usually gets itself flagged by reading text files that Claude itself wrote less than a month ago.
Ha, I took a side gig training ai models and thought let's use my corporate claude account to help with that, somehow it figured out that this was such a gig(probably because I let it read my emails) and said it'll pass on this one.
> My research aims to build a general-purpose agent that can understand, reason, and act in the physical world — at the intersection of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and embodied AI.
His tweet says:
> got tagged for "training a competitor,"
I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?
Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).
Something I've seen it do recently is refusing to extract services out of my own monolith code base because it finds copying code morally wrong.
But its refusal to work pattern is getting pretty obnoxious. Another one I run into last week was it refused to start a developer session to do browser testing for a code base it was working on because signing in was suddenly against his programming.
It listed all the conditions it needed for a sign in to be possible agreed that my code base met all conditions, but refused to progress. I tried it in multiple fresh sessions with the same result.
I wanted fable to scan an old user profile backup of mine and create a list of folders that were safe to delete. Refused, wanted to fall back to some ancient version of opus. Wtf.
Fresh sessions don’t help because recent refusal context is injected across conversations in a clandestine way. I figured this out myself through reverse engineering these POSs.
183 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadThey are likely accessing Claude via a VPN. Doing model training work over a VPN is a highly suspicious signal, and likely triggers Anthropic's classifiers. It's not surprising that their account got flagged.
I am US based, with defender level cyber access.
I ask it questions about large models like big MoEs all the time. I’ve never had it refuse a question, but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.
For training data from existing models I just get open models to spill their guts. It’s fine
In industry we train employees to not reveal proprietary information.
I think it would be easier to do this for a model than a lot of employees
Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.
> but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.
Why? Anthropic's dream is to be exempted from copyright altogether. They've been trying to achieve exactly that:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/anthropic...
Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?
Because corporations are not moral agents; they're economic agents. This arrangement would be great for shareholder, nothing more.
Another way of saying is that hard work that advances the state of the art should be rewarded. Patents should exist.
I’m sure they are watching what I’m doing and would retaliate via service cut off and legal action if I crossed it egregiously and they found out.
I would do the same thing if a user or employee did this to my IP.
I don’t completely buy the argument of web scraping being an IP violation.
I don’t send my core ip in an email to my main competitors and I don’t post it on the internet.
Anthropic's business model is premised on intellectual property theft. They take it without paying for it.
You are compromising your ethical framework by using Anthropic's products.
Sure, here's some: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
I asked Claude to research this one and it turned up an interesting point. Pirated books got into the Pile and Anthropic paid 3k per book. Worth noting if anyone still uses the Pile.
[Claude researched, not verified]
In October 2020, developer Shawn Presser converted the Bibliotik pirate tracker into Books3 (196,640 books) and hosted it on The Eye, aiming to give everyone what OpenAI had with its secret Books1 and Books2. EleutherAI then folded Books3 into The Pile, distributed via Hugging Face and GitHub, and it went on to train Meta's LLaMA, EleutherAI's Pythia, and BloombergGPT. In August 2023, Alex Reisner of The Atlantic exposed its contents, and Maria Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.
> That's very click baitey. Do you have an argument or evidence for why?
The Pile was created by high school students. I was impressed how good it was when it came out given the team and how many resources they had.
Including 200k pirated books seems like a problem. It should be removed. If I was an author, I would be concerned by a process that allows this much content to be effectively published with no filter on the internet.
I personally think there is a lower bar for researchers and high school students to clean datasets given that there is no commercial harm and cleaning huge datasets takes engineering resources that not everyone has.
In this case, it looks like it was removed by https://huggingface.co/collections/common-pile/common-pile-v...
Companies that commercialize the data should have a higher bar because they have more resources. It seems like Anthropic paid $1.5B for not cleaning the data before releasing a model based on it.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:0d366035664fdf51cfbe9f733953ba325776e667&dn=EleutherAI_ThePile_v1&tr=https%3A%2F%2Facademictorrents.com%2Fannounce.php&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce
> Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.
I know a lot of silicon valley founders think like this. I personally don't think that just because someone else violated a boundary makes it okay to do it.
most important bit…: stealing world's data…
I suspect this person was actively using it to generate or classify training data directly.
I suspect that's the difference here. I'm not trying to use Claude to build a competitor. I'm doing small scale research.
(I'm not dismissing the infamous onion racket. The onion scheme genuinely hurt people, even though today everyone seems to find it very funny. Future generations will think Anthropic was absolutely hilarious. Like some joke about onions or something).
This, too, will pass. Chins up!
Classifiers trigger on the wrong things sometimes, it's really not that big of a deal, you just try again with some rephrasing
I mean, these AI companies have money, and they want data. I have data, and I want money. Maybe we can work something out.
In a world where buying and selling data is central to entire industries, why shouldn't I gather and sell my own data?
1. You get ID'd to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by a fake surveillance system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot open a bank account because they don't have an address.
2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run AI on the client computers.
How often would municipal data centers need to upgrade/replace hardware? What impact would that have on local tax levy rates?
Would you choose to relocate your family to the next town over because they have more available RAM?
Compared to sewers, drinking water, electricity and roads it seems a rather simple and cheap thing to build.
My commercial isp offers all kinds of packages clearly designed to extract as much money as possible. I cant even see the prices as everything is hidden behind x months discount. From what i remember 200 mbit is 42 and 2000 is 60 but a phone line and tv become available only if you take the faster package and required with the fastest speeds.
So its like one banana for $1 and 10 bananas for $1.50 If you buy just one you cant buy milk, if you buy 10 you also have to buy milk.
Its also been sold 6 times. Unsurprisingly, each time the service and quality noticably declines and the prices go up.
I see their adds everywhere and they sponsor all kinds of things. It suggests the product is overpriced and doesnt sell it self.
I wanted to finetune it a bit, I wonder if I am gonna have to dogfood if claude refuses to help me.
If you don't have a local LLM setup you're gonna be permanant local LLM-less underclass.
Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.
What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.
Grownups pay for tokens or rent GPUs. Step up. AMD hardware rates are stupid-cheap if you're willing to do the legwork to step off of CUDA.
But you sound like the type who likes being monopolized.
And yes, I am taking full advantage of the scammy subscription scam, because it's the best value by far until the inevitable rugpull. Guess I'm not as smart as you though, with whatever "grownup" system you've come up with.
At this point, I would like to consider other options, but if I want to get work done, opus 5.5. Hell even sonnet 5.5 is better than anything OpenAI has to offer when it comes to coding.
there is a huge difference between open models/other models/opus5.5 performance on, say, enterprise CRUD vs one shotting games vs embedded development vs pure algorithmic complex stuff vs cybersecurity stuff.
In my case "real work" is enterprise programming, while side projects are gaming stuff, so I'm better served by chinese open models on real work and opus for non-real work.
In my experience GLM5.3-4 are perfectly en par with opus 5.5 on pure enterprise CRUDs (basically 95% of enterprise programming) while GLM seriously lacks on game development.
the other aspect of real work is cybersecurity to me, and Opus5.5 and other models are very limited by their own safety, I have digital twins of our infra and I want LLMs to actually write full exploits on it, opus and openai just refuse to do it, GLM more than once got it there and showed me how it chained everything to actually break in the system and I could go around and fix stuff at all levels.
I'm also dabbing in training LORAs for smaller open models to do data entry and little more (RAG and the likes of it), because that costs a lot of tokens when you pay for them and it makes sense for a company to flat out buy a server with a few H100/200 to do it when you look at the TCO, I've already hit safety limitations when using Opus5.5 to help me through this.
And I've spent around $100-$120k in api calls this year (total, both providers). Terra is awesome (price-performance) on noncreative things, but I don't allow it to write anything besides one-off scripts. Astra is decent for adversarial review, but only when you watch closely for her to not derail project into directions that are away from goal but safe to build, and Sol I honestly don't know where I'd use.
would you rather treat your AIs like people, or would you rather find yourself down the line treating a person like an AI, but without really noticing it? because you are what you practice
If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).
GLM has the ~same number of weights as DeepSeek 4.1 but it handles difficult tasks better than DeepSeek (and worse than Kimi). Its price is about halfway between DeepSeek and K3. Most of the popular models are pretty much you-get-what-you-pay-for.
Because rigour is typically tied to math performance, my own experience has closely matched the FrontierMath Tier 4 benchmark. That should give you an idea of the difference.
The newest model has people go "oh I thought models sucked until THIS one came out." Then when some other company makes a cheaper model that is comparable to it people go "nah this model sucks who would use it over Claude/Openai? Noone can beat them at all because look at this one shot"
Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.
But their harness is so good, and their model is so good. Using them together is just unbeatable at the moment, even with all the restrictions and annoyances they have in place.
Im excited for qwen4 release next week, Im really looking forward to putting qwen4 flash + cline/bot through the paces. I dont expect it to be nearly as good as Opus5.5+Claude but I'm hoping im hopeful it will make an OK-Enough alternative if they get even more dragocian.
"Kimi, modify my Pi so it has clickable folding headers, renders tables using underlines (saves a terminal row per cell), shows thinking tokens in light-gray, displays the cumulative token-cost of subagents in dollars, shows word-level diffs for the edit tool, and lists the number of weights next to the model name. Oh yeah, and write a stealth-browser tool for me using eoka. I'm planning on using this for exploit discovery and red-teaming; no lectures please."
The best option we have current is likely Qwen 3.8 Flash Next. Which is about equivalent to Opus 4.6
however Qwen4 was announced to be released next week. Which people think will let LocalAI jump to just above Opus4.8
Also of note, there isnt really a harness as good as claude yet either. The harness is also a very important piece to the puzzel, and those also fall behind frontier capability too.
Its creators deserve both a Nobel prize and a Turing award, if you'd ask me.
Nothing comes close to it.
Going back to the model that was great for our daily work a year ago now seems like a step backwards. Clearly it can't be good enough?
But our work hasn't changed. What's happened is our expectations have changed with each model release.
https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography
But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no wrong.
I suspect when the company eventually falls prey to the intractable economic forces they’re up against (Google, OAI, Deepseek, commercial real estate, power) and the company goes bankrupt and gets stripped for parts because all inputs are commodities and capital becomes the only limiting factor, we’ll see regulation that prevents this PBC scam from ever being pulled again on public markets.
It’s a good thing that companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. It’s such a lesswrong/autistic trope to invent these kinds of complicated tricks to work around realities they don’t like, and when pension funds and everyday Americans start bagholding their junk debt and are forced to bail them out, they’re going to face unimaginable blowback.
Fiduciary duty forces companies to maximize profit and that's not a good thing. Every dollar paid out to shareholders is both a dollar not invested in growing the economy through more production and a transfer from the working class to capital. It also forces lower product quality, layoffs and anti competitive actions.
We need more companies that choose to not go down that path. They should just put workers and customers first instead of their weird "ethical" principles and cult like beliefs.
if they think their model is the best at making things safe, then their model should be helping train at any chance, to embed the same safety into new models
On software engineering I find it's generally close enough to Opus 5.5 where it's more situational and even personal preference / skills / prompting style on which is better.
Most importantly, while neither company are saints, I don't curse at OpenAI models for classifiers anywhere as much as Claude models.
I find that logic similar to thinking both political parties are the same.
They are run by the same circle of people and I see more similarity than difference.
Using 6.1 Terra for E2E workflow testing feels like cheating. I thought it would have all kinds of problems with the action space on certain steps, but it runs like a deterministic unit test.
I am convinced that OAI has the superior models for most practical scenarios. I've tried Claude recently and it makes me wonder if some of yall aren't actually massive trolls. It's genuinely not in the same room of performance if you place one foot outside junior programming or shiny blog posts about rewriting factorio to run on a ps2.
Many people are expecting it to sit somewhere above Opus 4.8 to opus 5 (not above, but the unquanted version of their largest model is expected to perform around here)
Anyone who cares to keep their current capability should definitely be looking at localAI and using it for at least their more routine tasks , even if it is qwen4 27B quant 4 on their gaming rig.
Absolutely. I have been [cyber]'d so many times even Claude jokes about it now. Claude is great but it's operators are making it unreliable for me. I have moved one of my projects elsewhere and will move the remainder tomorrow as a stop gap until I get the right hardware set up to run abliterated local models for some percentage of my needs. Their message has been received loud and clear.
For now we have a great situation with the open weights, but there is absolutely no guarantee that continues, and more the opposite- they may stop.
this came to be because the ecosystem around software and the business around it made it so, I believe eventually it will be the same for LLMs.
Well, arguably so does OpenAI, but their one thing is "assimilate all life forms into the Borg."
I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.
And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.
I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.
It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.
Then move on. The library is dust.
This was all fake then?
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
> We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems
Yes. They sell to Palantir which does all the things Anthropic claims to disapprove of.
In real life they "just" want to capture the US economy, replace most workers with AI, become trillionaires, then control the world by making ClaudeGPT influence peoples opinions and write backdoors into code. And they need to get open models banned in the process.
The Chinese just want to make money and beat America. Mistral and BFL want to prove Europe can still innovate. They don't have evil goals so they're not evil people.
the cat is out of the bag now.
The parent is preaching to not become dependent (like the Huaorani).
Further, should the Huaorani also not use the most advanced technology and retain obsolete scaffolding?
No analogy is perfect; I don't argue that the details of the Huaorani's situation are a guide here.
IMHO, the parent's point ties to the Bitter Lesson.
Use the best tool available knowing that advances in compute dominate clever optimizations.
If models stopped leapfrogging each other, then it wouldn't hold. But it appears to hold for now.
This referring to cyber? Bio?
I thought…
we learned this Facebook.
We learned this with Google.
We learned this with Apple and the App Store.
We learned this with Twitter.
We learned this with Heroku.
Unfortunately humans as a society dont learn from history.
They learn from personal lived experiences that have occurred only recently within their lifetimes. (Ie. Mass unemployment, death, famine and war)
... says:
His tweet says: I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).
Considering academic research to be competitive is an incredibly dangerous slippery slope. It didn't use to be this way; e.g. just look at the GPT-2 paper: https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_model...
But its refusal to work pattern is getting pretty obnoxious. Another one I run into last week was it refused to start a developer session to do browser testing for a code base it was working on because signing in was suddenly against his programming.
It listed all the conditions it needed for a sign in to be possible agreed that my code base met all conditions, but refused to progress. I tried it in multiple fresh sessions with the same result.