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.
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.
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.
US/EU here (both, due to traveling), same story with anything related to modifying existing weights or SotA approaches in training/research, it's not a geolocation issue. The safeguards don't check your IP (but pretty soon will check someone's IP [pun intended])
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.
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.
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.
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).
Fairness isn’t the right lens. Copyright isn’t the right lens either. This is purely might-makes-right, where the winner has the best offence and best defence.
It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.
Well their justification is that distillation is bad because it means baddies can get their own models without their safeguards and then make anthrax nukes or whatever. Even though it's self serving, it's at least self-consistent.
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.
I have been doing RL for Magic the Gathering (longshot but having fun). Several times it triggered this flag. But that was a couple months ago. Everyone went crazy over Astra so I switched to open ai and had no issues. People are now going crazy over opus 5.5 so I’m playing with that.
Haven’t hit any issues so far, but two months in the code is very dirty but functional enough that I’m redoing it with more heavy hand holding.
I recommend having a paper as reference in mind if you don’t already know what you’re doing. I’m referencing the Stratego paper as reading that a year ago gave me the inspiration to try MTG.
Every model I’ve used has had a lot of trouble but if it wasn’t I figure I wouldn’t be having as much fun as I’ve been having or learning so much.
Isn't that simply what the API is? I'm not aware that Anthropic (nor OpenAI) have the power to block people from an API router which doesn't doxx their users. You seem to be offering to create a new router, of which there are many.
Last I checked, you trivially get anonymous API's to Fable and Astra (for a higher price); you'd need to real-ID directly to them only if you want restricted infosec-program stuff they block from their API.
(I use both through Kagi's API router (chatbot type). Too expensive for most things, but both very nice for research).
Better block than falsify information. Last I heard they were deliberately botching it whenever someone asked semi-advanced questions on model training.
I don’t think it is revelation, it feels like active incompetence. You can lay out every decision and watch Claude/OpenAI actively fuck up in inexplicable ways.
There have been a lot of write-ups about the future of AI. I see two distinct futures:
1. You get ID'd and biometrically scanned to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by an opaque censorship system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot even open a bank account because they don't have an address.
2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run suffiently powerful models 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?
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.
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.
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.
I am US based, with defender level cyber access.
... 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).
most important bit…: stealing world's data…
It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.
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.
Haven’t hit any issues so far, but two months in the code is very dirty but functional enough that I’m redoing it with more heavy hand holding.
I recommend having a paper as reference in mind if you don’t already know what you’re doing. I’m referencing the Stratego paper as reading that a year ago gave me the inspiration to try MTG.
Every model I’ve used has had a lot of trouble but if it wasn’t I figure I wouldn’t be having as much fun as I’ve been having or learning so much.
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?
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.
Because corporations are not moral agents; they're economic agents. This arrangement would be great for shareholder, nothing more.
I suspect this person was actively using it to generate or classify training data directly.
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?
Last I checked, you trivially get anonymous API's to Fable and Astra (for a higher price); you'd need to real-ID directly to them only if you want restricted infosec-program stuff they block from their API.
(I use both through Kagi's API router (chatbot type). Too expensive for most things, but both very nice for research).
How is it a secret if everyone has a model that is exactly like the other. Surely there are no secrets
Not yet, especially not with all of the incestuous cross-hiring that all the labs do.
But perhaps the various L. Bob Rife variants running these labs are using their advanced unreleased models to work on their own Snow Crashes.
1. You get ID'd and biometrically scanned to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by an opaque censorship system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot even open a bank account because they don't have an address.
2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run suffiently powerful models on the client computers.
My bet is on 1.
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?