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I really want to stick with A\ given everything known about Altman, but man are they speedrunning the "how to destroy your reputation" guidebook.
by dmd 5mo ago
I really want to stick with A\ given everything known about Altman, but man are they speedrunning the "how to destroy your reputation" guidebook.
- Insanity 5mo agoThey have better PR than OpenAI but they are not a more ethical company. They do a bunch of shady stuff and are just as much involved in military applications. Cal Newport’s recent podcast had a good discussion about this: https://youtu.be/BRr3pAPsQAk?si=jaRJYJ_XQE7VpxPN https://youtu.be/BRr3pAPsQAk?si=jaRJYJ_XQE7VpxPN
- esperent 5mo agoPet peeve of mine is people saying "hey this thing is totally shady/false, I've got proof right here <links to hour long podcast>". It happens surprisingly often.
- rexpop 5mo agoCal Newport and tech commentator Ed Zitron discussed this disparity between Anthropic's public image and their actual practices. Despite cultivating a reputation as the "ethical" AI company, Zitron argues that Anthropic's actions show they are just as ruthless and ethically questionable as their competitors. Anthropic has been deeply integrated with the US military, having been installed with classified access since June 2024. The podcast highlights that Claude has been actively utilized during the "Venezuela incursion" and the ongoing "war in Iran". Despite this active involvement, CEO Dario Amodei released a statement attempting to publicly distance the company from the Department of Defense by declaring they would not allow their technology to be used for "mass domestic surveillance" or "fully autonomous weapons". Zitron categorizes this as a highly calculated PR maneuver, pointing out that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of controlling autonomous weapons anyway. The stunt successfully manufactured a wave of positive press—with celebrities and commentators praising Anthropic as an ethical objector—right when the company was trying to secure an IPO or a massive ~$100 billion valuation, all while they quietly remained an active part of the war effort. Beyond their military contracts, the podcast details several highly questionable business practices Anthropic has used to artificially inflate their numbers: 1. During a lawsuit regarding their military contract, Anthropic's CFO filed a sworn affidavit revealing the company had only made $5 billion in its entire lifetime. This directly contradicted leaked media reports suggesting they made $4.5 billion in 2025 alone. It revealed that the company's publicly perceived run rate was heavily exaggerated through the "shady revenue math" popular in Silicon Valley, a major discrepancy that most financial journalists ignored. 2. When the open-source agent library OpenClaw first launched, Anthropic deliberately allowed users to connect a $200/month "max account" and essentially burn through thousands of dollars of API compute at Anthropic's expense. Zitron points out that Anthropic knowingly let this happen to temporarily boost their usage metrics and hype while they raised a $30 billion funding round. Just weeks after securing the funding, they abruptly cut off access for these users, a move Zitron cites as proof of them being an "unethical company". Furthermore, the company has faced criticism for gaslighting users, maintaining poor service availability, and silently degrading model performance while rug-pulling users on rate limits. As Zitron summarizes, it is highly unlikely that either Anthropic or OpenAI actually care about these ethical boundaries beyond how they can be weaponized for better PR and higher valuations.
- petcat 5mo ago> Despite cultivating a reputation as the "ethical" AI company, Zitron argues that Anthropic's actions show they are just as ruthless and ethically questionable as their competitors. Anthropic has taken 10s of billions from investors just like everyone else has. There is no such thing as "ethics" or "morality" when the scale of obligation is that large. So yes, this is obvious despite whatever image they try to cultivate.
- fwipsy 5mo agoAnthropic is a public benefit corporation which limits liability to shareholders. Just because they screwed up their billing doesn't mean every ethical commitment they've ever made is bunk.
- Capricorn2481 5mo ago> Anthropic is a public benefit corporation which limits liability to shareholders What does this have to do with their ethics? This seems irrelevant unless your understanding of ethics ends at fiduciary duty to investors.
- fwipsy 5mo agoIt's the opposite. Parent comment was saying they must be unethical due to their duty to investors. As a public benefit corporation, they can take ethics into account even if it harms shareholders. The extent to which they do so is still up to them, as I understand it, but they aren't forced to be evil as parent was suggesting.
- Capricorn2481 5mo agoAh, got you.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago> There is no such thing as "ethics" or "morality" when the scale of obligation is that large. At that scale, ethics and morality should become more important, not discarded
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoProbably some Slopcoded bot which posts fake comments to drive people to their content. After all, if you’re paying hundreds of millions to buy these shitty podcasts, you might as well host some bots.
- fwipsy 5mo agoAccount is from 2016 with 6k karma? : doubt:
- Insanity 5mo agoDid you even check the link? It's a podcast from Cal Newport, a quite known figure (at least in software engineering / compsci circles). So it's not exactly a random shitty podcast. And, it's also (obviously) not my content.
- Leynos 5mo agoI hadn't heard of him until he got famous last month for slagging off the AI industry.
- Insanity 5mo agoI understand not everyone has the interest or time to sit through an hour long podcast. But last I checked this is HN, and I think that podcast is right up the alley for many of us here. Cal Newport is not exactly a 'random podcaster'. Next time I can summarize some of the talking points in my comment though, but I didn't want to poorly regurgitate the arguments when they were readily available in the video lol. Although I see another poster has commented the key takeaways :)
- esperent 5mo agoWhat I want is for people to give evidence that can be checked within a few minutes at most. But claiming you have proof and expecting me to a) just believe you or b) invest an hour of my time to dispute or agree with you... That's just a selfish way of having a conversation. If you gave me some timestamps in that hour, that would be fine. Or if you gave a much shorter and easier to consume piece of evidence and then said that it's also discussed in the podcast if someone wants to invest more time into this, also fine.
- garbagewoman 5mo agosometimes people aren't looking for an argument, theyre just sharing something. Discussions don't have to strictly be about right vs wrong, unless you're on reddit
- simplyluke 5mo agoPodcasts are still short form if we're talking about something as complex as "is this company ethical". Issues involving human players and disagreements over philosophy/ethics take a huge amount of information to understand at anything beyond a vibes level. You can understand almost any controversial issue better than almost everyone commenting on it by reading 1-3 books on the subject. It's becoming more of an x-factor as people get conditioned to expect everything to fit in a headline, chat response, or 10 second social media video.
- empthought 5mo agoPodcasts (and video) are very low-throughput, low-density information channels. Essays and articles are superior. To demonstrate this, you can just compare the transcript of a typical podcast — even a high-quality, well-researched one — with a typical high-quality, well-researched blog post, essay, or journalistic article.
- Capricorn2481 5mo agoIt's odd that people don't understand this. It's not about Tiktok brain. I would rather read a book or a dense article than listen to people meander on a Podcast and pad their time.
- Insanity 5mo agoSure, but the other angle is time investment. I only listen to podcasts sporadically but I can definitely see why people like it. Not as a substitute to reading but _in addition_ to reading. Listening to a podcast can be done while driving, or cooking, etc. It beats sitting in traffic and just listening to music (to some people).
- Capricorn2481 5mo agoI don't think multitasking and giving some of your attention to two people talking in conversation format is a great way to get information. There's a strong argument it's a recipe for getting misinformation, because you aren't verifying a single thing they say, and you may be going off the vibes of the host. An uncritical "Wow that's crazy" from podcast hosts is really all it takes for people to believe anything. And some people are so socially isolated and exposed to so much toxicity online that just listening to two people talk like friends severely lowers their guard to misinformation.
- inquirerGeneral 5mo ago[dead]
- foobar_______ 5mo agoAgreed. they are better at the PR game. Some developers are grasping at straws looking for ways to not feel guilty and justify their usage of LLMs is from the "good guys". Anthropic is currently filling this role but eventually people will see behind the smoke and mirrors and release its not all that different from OpenAI or some of the other AI labs who are willing to sacrifice any amount of ethics if they mean they get the right paycheck or stroke their ego that they were on the team that built digital god.
- Leynos 5mo ago[dead]
- jp57 5mo agoHa. Yes. "Speedrunning enshittification" is the phrase that's been in my head. The flat-rate plans were the top of the slippery slope to enshittification, really. If everyone were on metered billing there'd be no reason for all these opaque and sneaky attempts to limit usage. People would pay for what they get and get what they pay for.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoThere is nothing wrong with flat-rate plans. I work at an LLM-serving startup, and am aware of at least three competitors, that (a) provide flat rate subs (b) are extremely profitable and (c) are bootstrapped, ie. not beholden to investors (there are also many other competitors but I can't ascertain their profitability or investment status). You simply need to price the flat-rate sub at a price that's profitable when averaged out over all of your users, both light and heavy, and prevent fully automated usage by the power users. That's it. This is immensely more user-friendly, and I doubt you'd get any traction at all if you didn't do this. Even if you pay more for the sub, having unlimited (non-automated) usage frees a mental barrier to using the product. If you have to pay for every request you make, it introduces a hesitation to do anything - it makes the user hesitant to experiment, hesitant to prompt for anything of slightly less significance, anxious about the exact token consumption of every prompt, and so on. It's not enjoyable to use when you're being penny pinched for every prompt. Anthropic's problem, of course, is that they are not bootstrapped. They don't have a business model that can compete with startups running DeepSeek or GLM on their own hardware. Non-frontier startups got to skip the whole "tens of billions of dollars in debt" step of creating a frontier model from scratch, and still get to run a model that is perhaps 80%-85% as good as Anthropic's, which is good enough for millions of customers. So Anthropic is desperate, backed into a corner, and doing anything and everything they can to try to right their sinking ship, no matter how scummy.
- vintermann 5mo ago> prevent fully automated usage by the power users. But being a power user and fully automating things is the whole appeal.
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- theplatman 5mo agothey are essentially Lyft in early Uber vs. Lyft days. They are marketing themselves vaguely as being "better" because they're "more ethical" but their actions make it clear that they're not much better than OAI.
- reactordev 5mo agoExcept Lyft didn't kick you out in the bad part of town simply because you mentioned the word lollipop. Claude will terminate your session, peg you to 100% usage, and more, to stop you from using the service you paid for.
- kandros 5mo agoAdding many new chapters to it
- rglullis 5mo agoI cancelled my subscription the minute they blocked access via OpenCode and switched to Ollama Cloud. A bunch of people here tried to defend Anthropic, saying that it was justified because it was likely that Claude Code's harness had optimizations that would not be possible on OpenCode. It was clear from the source leak that nothing of this sort was the case, and that they were simply trying to avoid others distilling their models. GLM and Queen are not on par with Opus, but they are good enough and I never had hit the usage limits, even with 2-3 sessions running.
- noctuid 5mo agoWhat's just as crazy is people defending ollama.
- Congeec 5mo agohttps://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185 https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185
- rglullis 5mo agoThey are no saints, but at least their solution is actually open source and they can not lock me in like the others can. To illustrate the point, you can replace "Ollama Cloud" with "OpenCode Go" if you want. Or if you prefer you can give enough hardware to run the larger open weight models on my own.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- duped 5mo agoI think people inside the tech bubble don't realize that AI companies are considered villainous by the public. So there's no reputation to destroy.
- cute_boi 5mo agoI don’t think Anthropic is more ethical than OpenAI. And honestly, OpenAI is not just Altman; we should judge a company by its actions. OpenAI has released more open-source projects, like Codex and GPT-OSS. What has Anthropic given?
- addedGone 5mo agoThis is quite a real take, each time I ask people what's inferior about OpenAI without citing any politics, they can't really do it. gpt-5.5 is above Opus 4.7 for serious engineering as well, and many of their contributions are very useful for the OSS world. More so, imagine the whole open-source community PREACHING a binary that is literally using heavy telemetry, unknown and questionable behavior instead of codex, completely open-source.
- rglullis 5mo ago> we should judge a company by its actions Okay, then let's judge it by the fact that they started as a non-profit and now are are playing the same growth-at-all-costs playbook from Silicon Valley. Or let's judge them by how they they consider themselves above copyright law, and went on to US congress to say "we can not run this business without stealing intellectual property". Or how they they don't mind making deals with the Saudis. Or how they don't mind getting in bed with Trump to secure expedited construction of their datacenters. Or how they are making all types of accounting fraud (the circular deals) to keep propping up the bubble, and will undoubtly be footed by the taxpayers when it finally pops? > What has Anthropic given? Anthropic is also trash. They are guided by this whole "Effective Altruism" bullshit which should be enough to raise all sorts of red flags. But to think that OpenAI is somehow "better" is completely absurd. Both of them are dangerous and both of them should not exist.
- bdangubic 5mo agoIf you do this judging on every S&P Company and make them "not exist" you'd end up with Mom & Pop shops as you'd be closing the whole joint :)
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- moomoo11 5mo agoI’d argue sama is a far better person. At least you know his intentions, which is that he will do anything to win. And codex actually works, I can let it run for hours and at least come back and it’s done a good job. CC not only fucked me with false advertising on Opus that I cancelled, but it fucking stops working so often or sucks after a little bit of context usage. A\ ceo is a bad salesman (50% of X will lose their jobs, 3 months later 50% of Y will lose their jobs). A\ also falsely advertised their Opus usage that me and many others cancelled months ago. They even were nuking all GitHub issues around this. IMO, CC is for tourists and people who fall for AI marketing on X.
- gitaarik 5mo agoFunny, for me Claude Code works perfectly, and I don't have to wait for hours, my prompts are usually done within minutes. And the results are most of the time great.
- vips7L 5mo agoAll of these companies are unethical. They’ve all stolen everything from the working class.