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> According to Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train
by chowells 1y ago
> According to Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models”
That's... quite a license term. I'm a big fan of tools that come with no restrictions on their use in their licenses. I think I'll stick with them.
- ygjb 1y agoGood luck with that! Most of the relevant model providers include similar terms (Grok, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistal, basically everyone with the exception of some open model providers).
- chowells 1y agoYou're like 50% of the way there...
- bitwize 1y agoFor years it was a license violation to use Microsoft development tools to build a word processor or spreadsheet. It was also a violation of your Oracle license to publish benchmark results comparing Oracle to other databases. If you compete with a vendor, or give aid and comfort to their competitors, do not expect the vendor to play nice with you, or even keep you on as a customer.
- DaSHacka 1y agoHmm so "because you split spending between us and a competitor, we'll force you to give the competitor the whole share instead!" Certainly a mindset befitting microsoft and Oracle, if I ever saw one.
- immibis 1y agoWell, the customer has to choose to give your competitor the whole share or give you the whole share, and these companies are betting on being important enough the customer chooses the latter. Don't forget a lot of their appeal is about (real or perceived) liability. If you use Postgres and you fuck up, you fuck up. If you use Oracle and you fucked up, you can blame Oracle and save face.
- sroussey 1y agoDoesn’t the ban on benchmarking Oracle still stand today?
- mdaniel 1y agoGiven the law firm in question which just happens to develop an RDBMS, I wouldn't want to find out Besides, lol, who cares how fast a model-T can go when there are much nicer forms of transportation that don't actively hate you
- david38 1y agoI can understand the benchmark issue. It often happens when someone benchmarks something, it’s biased or wrong in some way. I don’t believe it should be legal, but I see why they would be butt-hurt
- gruez 1y ago>For years it was a license violation to use Microsoft development tools to build a word processor or spreadsheet. source?
- ack_complete 1y agoYou have to go pretty far back, it was in the Visual C++ 6.0 EULA, for instance (for lack of a better link): https://proact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Visual-Basic-Enterprise_6.0_English_11762fc4-f3b9-4bf5-a513-b4a9b76b4f60.pdf https://proact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Visual-Basic-En... It wasn't a blanket prohibition, but a restriction on some parts of the documentation and redistributable components. Definitely was weird to see that in the EULA for a toolchain. This was removed later on, though I forget if it's because they changed their mind or removed the components.
- dude250711 1y agoWell, Open AI had been whining about DeepSeek back in the day, so it is fair in a way.
- valtism 1y agoWould something like that hold up in court?
- compootr 1y agothey can choose who they do & don't want to do business with
- manquer 1y agoLaw does not work like that. - Contracts can have unenforceable terms that can be declared null and void by a court, any decision not to renew the contract in future would have no bearing on the current one. - there are plenty of restrictions on when/ whether you can turn down business for example FRAND contracts or patents don’t allow you choose to not work with a competitor and so on.
- ronsor 1y agoPeople always say "this wouldn't hold up in court" and "the law doesn't work like that" when it comes to contract, but in reality, contracts can mostly contain whatever you want. I see no reason why Anthropic can't arbitrarily ban OpenAI, regardless of my opinion on the decision. Anthropic hasn't "patented" access to the Claude API; there are no antitrust concerns that I can see; etc.
- staticman2 1y agoNobody was asking if Anthropic can ban OpenAI. I believe they were asking if the contract that can ban using the output to train an AI would hold up in court. And no, it isn't clear to me that this contract term would hold up in court as Anthopic doesn't have copyright ownership in the AI output. I don't believe you can enforce copyright related contracts without copyright ownership. I could be wrong of course, but I find it odd this topic comes up from time to time but apparently nobody has a blog post by a lawyer or similar to share on this issue.
- palata 1y agoCan't we say it's "fair use"? They do whatever they want saying it's "fair use", I don't see why I couldn't.
- ijusthadto 1y agoExactly this. Strange that this comment got downwoted. AI companies are scrapping the entire internet disregarding copyright and pirating books. Without it, models will be useless.
- dougSF70 1y agoAlso Twitter TOS when accessing firehose was that you could not recreate a Twitter client.
- johnisgood 1y agoSame with Discord, for example. In fact, in another instance, my account got disabled for having used it for bots.
- ethan_smith 1y agoThese anti-competitive clauses are becoming standard across all major AI providers - Google, Microsoft, and Meta have similar terms. The industry is converging on a licensing model that essentially creates walled gardens for model development.
- werrett 1y agoYou guys are tripping. EULAs have had anti-competition, anti-benchmarking, anti-reverse engineering and anti-disparagement clauses since the late 90s. These unknown companies called Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, Apple, Adobe, … et al have all had these controversies at various points.
- heavyset_go 1y agoI am not a fan of Apple or Oracle, but you are not contractually prevented from competing with them if you use Macs or Oracle Cloud to build software. I wouldn't suggest building on Oracle's property as you drink its milkshake, but the ToS and EULAs don't restrict competition.
- JamesBarney 1y agoOracle licenses 100% restrict reverse engineering it's product to build a competing once, which is probably the closest to what these AI giants are trying to restrict.
- forty 1y agoOracle db products are not meant to build databases, unlike LLM code generator which are meant to build any kind of software, so the restriction sounds a bit different. Imagine if Oracle was adding a restrictions on what you are allowed to build with Java, that would be a more similar comparison IMO.
- whaleofatw2022 1y ago
- beefnugs 1y agoDumbest thing they could do, why would you cut off insight into what your competitors are doing?
- ramoz 1y agoBecause they don't blatantly read people's prompts. They have a confidential inference architecture. They don't target and analyze specific user or organizations - that would be fairly nefarious. The only exception would be if there are flags for trust and safety. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8325621-i-would-like-to-input-sensitive-data-into-free-claude-ai-or-my-pro-max-account-who-can-view-my-conversations https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8325621-i-would-li...
- swalsh 1y agoOh I wonder if that applies to me? I've been using claude to do experiments with using SNN's for language models. Doubt anything will come of it... has mostly just been a fun learning experience, but it is technically a "competing product" (one that doesn't work yet)
- whatevaa 1y agoIf you release it, it will be a competing product, experiments are just research.
- stingraycharles 1y agoBut he’s building it right now, and the building part is what’s illegal. It’s a very gray area.
- fn-mote 1y agoYou definitely forgot the scare quotes around "illegal".
- stingraycharles 1y agoYou're correct. Illegal was the wrong term; a potential violation of their ToS would have been a better choice of words.
- malloryerik 1y agoAh, yes, just like a good robots.txt do-not-use-me-to-train-your-ai term of service that the LLM companies adhere to strictly?