The loss of trust in using US based model's is unlikely to come back though.
Anthropic with it's hyped doomsday messaging, and the administration falling for it (at best), has eroded a lot of trust and has triggered an arms race of sorts.
I really don't think this is effective advertising, reactions have been negative virtually everywhere.
The security bugs were real (see the Open Source projects struggling to keep up) so I think gradual rollout was sensible originally before the ban. But people have always resented safety steps.
For the purposes of technical excellence, you are absolutely correct that this has been bad. For the purposes of money-getting, this has very much been a case of "there's no such thing as bad publicity".
Anthropic is very much in the money-getting business right now.
"W have to go through a regulatory approval process like everyone else" is so much less sexy than "Our model was so powerful that it got banned by the government after a few hours and now all our competitors have to go through a regulatory process invented because of us"
There's nothing sexy about it. From the get go they were accused of FUD drama and that it backfired as predicted. Now what I see in reality is that Anthropic mostly reaped more resentment from their poor marketing attempt. And their model is basically useless or unreliable from being lobotomized by guardrails.
Subscription folks barely have access to the model. Some report a single prompt before hitting weekly limit. And that's when it works instead of downgrading.
If that is a first movers play, it's a disastrous one.
How sexy do you think this guy finds Anthropic now?
> Today I told Sonnet (!) to use a browser MCP to enter a username and password for the project it is working on, it told me that it can't do that because it violates its security protocol.
> This worked fine before. I love Claude, I have stuck with it even through people saying Codex is better but this is definitely getting to be the last straw.
Meanwhile I can tell GLM 5.2 to decompile and crack anything I want with tools like IDA MCP and packet sniffing and it just works. Let alone code.
No. The "good guys" are the ones who provide permanent value: open weight models, hardware we can afford, purchase and own. The good guys offer sovereignty.
The "you'll buy intelligence from us on a meter" rent seekers are technofeudalists. Just a bunch of "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" oligarchs who must be resisted at all costs. Anthropic had a reputation for ethics at first but it quickly became clear it was just like OpenAI but with a patronizing attitude.
The fact China is releasing open weight models will never not be amusing. I expected better from the USA.
So... it IS China, not just companies in China. And why would the CCP want to give out open weights, hmm? Because they are all kindness and love? No. It is just their approach to counter dominance in the space by Western frontier labs. No need to make moral attributions..it is everything, and I mean everything, about Great Power Competition.
Their self serving reasons are irrelevant. The results can be moral even if the players aren't. The key is to somehow prevent any one of them from dominating completely so we can play them off one another and keep reaping the rewards. If China's undermining efforts achieves that, so be it. The fact we're getting permanent access to powerful models as a result is nothing short of awesome.
In order for us to win, neither China nor the US can win. The ideal situation is the one where they exhaust themselves trying while we benefit by picking up the pieces.
"Their self serving reasons are irrelevant" - I disagree, we have no idea what kind of filtering or injection of BS has been done to this model.
When you outsource your thinking, you have to be extremely careful that the model doing your thinking is acting in good faith. I have no idea what the CCP may have put into this thing. Not that the US based models aren't suspect, but the CCP certainly doesn't engender trust here. That said, I still use them, but I'm under no illusions that "their self serving reasons are irrelevant".
People. Americans included. The US is trending towards technofeudalism. "You'll rent the computer/inference from us on a meter". "You will own nothing and you'll be happy". Just look at the housing market.
I assume you want to be part of the owner class and avoid becoming a perpetual payment serf.
That is literally the point of world trade buddy... lmao
Its just funny how there is some scary boogeyman around China. You do realise the idiotic west gave china everything - from know-how, techniques to IP by benefitting from lower costs of production?
No,it's not just like world trade. It's world trade within strategic good, assets, and, capabilities relevant to national security...e.g. critical minerals, high end chips, and artificial intelligence, and others. Not all world trade is as central to national security, and is only relevant to national security in aggregate. I do agree that the U.S. made bad choices in terms of over-reliance on Chinese supply chains. Too much credence was given to the idea that capitalism would democratize China in the absence of other supporting factors/culture.
The purpose is the destabilization and discrediting of democracy. The Beijing state, in concert with Putin and ex-Khamenei, has no other purpose but to prove there is no democratic alternative. Sure, it turns out you get free things as e.g. one got free RT America.
The democratic world that wants to price me out of computers? Lock me out with remote attestation? Put me in a permanent underclass where I'm forced to rent computers and inference from the owner class instead of operating my own systems? A world so democratic it's degenerating into technofeudalism? Where you'll own nothing and you'll be happy?
At least they're honest about it. No preaching about freedom or safety like the USA.
> They only do open source because their hand was forced.
Optimal outcome considering the status quo. I hope the USA and China keep forcing each other's hands until the end of time so that we can keep reaping the benefits of their competition. If China develops their own DRAM and GPU industries, it would significantly weaken the threat of US export bans on inference capable hardware.
If you've built a product based on AI, then diversify or make an abstraction layer so your product is model agnostic and you can plug and play any model. If you're an end user like a software engineer, just use another model or like Gemini or ChatGPT. That is more productive than complaining about a trust which wasn't there in the first place to begin with.
Anthropic provides a service and they can stop offering it regardless of export ban or not, same goes for any other AI company in any country. If you really wants a trusted LLM, then run your own open weight model.
They didn't say "random models". The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.
Anthropic's best models are very good, maybe the best in their category. But, they have direct competition. You can, in fact, just switch to Codex or Gemini or GLM. It mostly is plug and play. I have a preference but I also have options.
> The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.
well they dont tell you that do they? there is no way to tell what model can and cannot do unless you extensivevly test it yourself and pray for the best.
If you don’t have a proper testing mechanism for your product, regardless of the model, you shouldn’t be shipping it. Praying for the best is not a strategy and don’t blame your lack of testing strategy on the LLM capability mismatch
OpenRouter would like a word. Also my in progress SaaS would like a word. Models are incredibly interchangable, just find best performance per cost and optimize harness and prompts, easy to have multiple configs for each model.
On the other side. What would happen if Anthropic did not communicate like they did and Fable was used to hack Pentagon? Dario would swing from a tree.
The vast mojority of its users were probably clueless about all this happening at all. We forget we live in a bubble here on HN. They'll spin it as their success and carry on.
Anthropic with it's hyped doomsday messaging, and the administration falling for it (at best), has eroded a lot of trust and has triggered an arms race of sorts.