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And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic. Yeah. Nah. Bringing out the same drum I’ve been
by stego-tech 3mo ago
And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.
Yeah. Nah.
Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves.
The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation; at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights.
It’s the Princess Bride meme but for AI: “you’re trying to take what I’ve rightfully stolen!” I’m tired of having to put on some sort of mask of decency and professionalism to discuss a topic whose counterparty gets to wallow in toxic waste without recourse, and these sorts of stories only reinforce that despite being a glib jerk about it, I’m still on the high road, here.
More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.
- GiorgioG 3mo agoAnyone who thinks these companies ever cared about any of that is naive.
- Davidzheng 3mo agoThen I am naive, but I think they cared before they got powerful and chatgpt release.
- nchmy 3mo agoSo you're saying they have no integrity?
- SimianSci 3mo agoso back when the stakes were low to non-existant? If your principles are only available on display when there is no consequence, they arnt your principles, they are a mask.
- daveguy 3mo ago100% this. OpenAI created a for-profit subsidy (that is now an SBC and only controlled 26% by the original non-profit). Guess when they did that? After GPT-2 (Feb 2019) and before GPT-3 (June 2020). Not remotely surprising they started the move to for-profit as soon as they had something they thought could be profitable. Then in 2025 they switched to an SBC, dropped the non-profit control well below 50% and completely got rid of the profit cap. Just in time for the IPO talk. It was a mask the whole time.
- sodapopcan 3mo agoAt most I would buy that they convinced themselves they cared. It bought them a lot of good will at the time.
- serial_dev 3mo agoDeveloping the thing they say will cause the end of the world? Look, if I was worried about nuclear bombs, I wouldn’t work on a nuclear bomb developing research center. It’s all fake and pompous garbage.
- stego-tech 3mo agoI mean naivety is the default until wisdom born of experience prevails. I bought into the “do no evil” mantra of Google, and boy howdy did I learn the hard lessons from that. It’s partly not arbitrarily punishing the naive unless they refuse to learn the lesson. Invite them in, acknowledging the error in judgement, and help them to be better going forward. That’s how we win.
- GiorgioG 3mo agoCapitalism creates never satiated hunger for more profits at almost any cost (even human life...see health insurance, but that's another discussion).
- williamdclt 3mo agoMaybe they cared, but that's always been irrelevant. "Show me the incentive and i'll show you the outcome": the only incentive for a company in our economic system is to make as much money as possible, anything in the way of that will get eroded by incentives (principled people get fired, or quit, or their principles weaken, or they get forced into doing things against their principles, or they get outcompeted, or...). Thinking that an actor in a system will go against the incentives of the system (at least at scale and over time) is naive.
- Flip-per 3mo agoHow about Volvo giving away their patented 3-point safety belt design for free to all competitors? https://techandmedialaw.com/open-patent-rights-for-seatbelts/ https://techandmedialaw.com/open-patent-rights-for-seatbelts... (edit: sorry, re-reading your comment you were more directly referring to the AI companies and this context, I interpreted this more generally on my first glance)
- epolanski 3mo ago> at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights. China also publishes a lot of impactful research in the open which has benefitted US labs too.
- john_strinlai 3mo ago>And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic. it wasn't really "be nicer" and im surprised that was your takeaway; your last comment which was flagged had no substance. it was boring. ("i hate american aitechbros". neat.) at least this comment has some conversation starter in it.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nozzlegear 3mo ago> Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves. Preach! Anthropic and OpenAI care about one thing, and it's not safety or the benefit of humanity: it's regulatory capture. All that other shit they wring their hands about – Anthropic especially – is invariably a marketing tactic or a persuasion tactic meant to convince us that A) they have the most capable, dangerous AIs and wouldn't you like to use them; and B) only they can be trusted to develop them because look at all these precautions they take and all of the blog posts/tweets their founders write about the oncoming doom of humanity.
- usef- 3mo agoWhat should they do instead? As far as I can tell from their actions they (Anth) are true believers about safety
- pkulak 3mo agoThey are true believers in preventing distillation.
- usef- 3mo agoIs that anti safety? Most of the safety pilled people seem to want SOTA models closed. There were so many security issues to patch in recent months that some open source projects stopped accepting them. I'm not sure how people still think Anthropic was lying.
- revolvingthrow 3mo agoSo far the first and only sophisticated cyberattack was carried out by openai rather than by one the subversive commie models that hate us for our freedoms, so forgive me for taking their safety and alignment spiel somewhat less seriously than they’d like.
- jrflo 3mo agoNo large company has ever cared about anything other than the financials, this is not specific to AI.
- brookst 3mo agoGeneralizations are embarrassing. Companies don’t have souls or minds. Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials.
- jrflo 3mo agoI'm not referring to the sum feeling of all employees, I'm referring to the actions of the company as a whole, which is largely driven by the C-suite who have a financial responsibility to investors.
- usef- 3mo agoEven narrowing it down to them and their actions, they still do care about many other things. You might have only seen the worst in the media.
- krunck 3mo ago> Some people in some large companies have absolutely cared about social good, art, and other things outside of financials. But companies do not care about social good, art, and other things outside of financials. A company is a generalization of sorts of all the people within the company who have influence over it's direction. 100% of people working for companies have a profit motive. That's why people work for for companies.
- usef- 3mo agoBy that logic, 100% of professional musicians and farmers also have a profit motive. Not sure what we should conclude from that? People do truly care about a lot of other things in their work, even if it makes them money.
- asdaqopqkq 3mo agoalso China actually legally pays the API costs even when distilling. OPenAI and ANtro just straight up abused scraping bots which overloaded servers
- usef- 3mo agoThey are scraping too, and don't follow copyright any more thoroughly (less if you count all the licensing openai, anth are doing now)
- ACCount37 3mo agoWhat China does is: buy accounts or API inference, often through shady methods, and then resell it at a cost/small profit/small loss (access to advanced AI models is often restricted for users in China, so there's a demand for region lock bypasses) - while saving all the traffic between the real AI users and the AI platform for future analysis, including distillation. Being an "AI inference middleman" is pretty lucrative, and AI companies have only started to crack down on it.
- brookst 3mo agoThe thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument. A quick scan shows a lack of rigor that usually points towards zealotry rather than a reasoned position: you imply that models are only trained on copyrighted work, you don’t address the ridiculous “copyright forever, nothing goes public domain” policies that got us to this place, you don’t distinguish between training on an 80 year old copyrighted work whose author is dead and rights are just in a company portfolio, and you assert that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has ever done anything altruistic. If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.
- aeon_ai 3mo agoThe latent space must have property boundaries as real and respected as those in the physical domain, lest we lose our ability to capitalize on them. For now, and into the future, I hope that we protect that unique and novel idea of an anthropomorphic mouse, which should be expanded to cover all forms of anthropomorphism, if we're being honest with ourselves. And, to that point, the protection of that idea should also extend to the (clearly infringing) hit 90s YA book series Animorphs, as it somewhat sounds like anthropomorphism. Protect their rights! Anything produced within the conceptual acreage that has been clearly marked and claimed is theft!
- twister2920 3mo agohave you considered that you're not the person this argument is trying to convince?
- gruez 3mo agoSo who is this trying to convince? All of this is bog-standard anti-AI argument that you can find on reddit. It's closer to preaching to the choir than actually trying to convince anyone.
- Yokohiii 3mo ago> The thing about screaming and waving your arms is it makes it hard for people to connect with the argument. The question is whether people like Altman, Amodei, Musk are part of the common case in Hanlon's razor or they want to trigger emotional responses to gain agency in the mess.
- paulddraper 3mo agoFortunately, some people see no reason to hamstring development. > Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. > This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate. [1] - David Sacks, Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology [1] https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078092271296143593 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078092271296143593
- voakbasda 3mo agoIf only reason would prevail in the Whitehouse….
- paulddraper 3mo agoDavid Sacks is a Trump admin advisor.
- jvuygbbkuurx 3mo agoI think originally they had good intentions. But they just cannot afford not to pull up the ladder, they raised too much.
- d5lt5 3mo ago> I think originally they had good intentions. It was never the intent. What we are seeing is the methodology that Peter Thiel (hello, ycombinator) described in his book Zero to One [0]: "Competition is for losers" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_to_One
- williamdclt 3mo agoIntentions never win over incentives, especially as time and scale increase. And we live in an economic system where the only incentive is "make as much money as possible".
- dan_i 3mo ago[dead]
- arionhardison 3mo agoI fully agree; but we also MUST STOP PRETENDING like HN and YC are good faith actors here. They are not. They blatantly curate (by flagging) comments and do everything possible to help both companies do this. Its not just OpenAI/Anthropic, there is a toxic ecosystem here supporting itself and doing everything possible to subvert the will of the people. There is 0 interest in merit and absolute focus on regulatory capture here and all YC investors and staff are fully complicit.
- dan_i 3mo ago[dead]
- echelon 3mo agoIt's not HN. It's the readers. There are lots of Anthropic and OpenAI employees here. There are also lots of people that totally hate AI here. If they don't like your comment, some of them will flag you. I get caught up in this frequently. The flagging strongly correlates with the audience that the headline sentiment attracts. In a thread like this that is laser-focused on real criticism of OpenAI and Anthropic you'll do just fine to call out their bad behavior.
- arionhardison 3mo agoTY for your response. People like you make me miss the old HN. I (antidotally) feel that now its much more common to just down vote and feel self-righteous as opposed to actually taking the time to craft an articulate response. The reason I feel its more than the readers is because "dang" and the other hall monitors do their best to enforce this also. Its no longer the "hacker mentality" its post what helps the YC portfolio and no matter the merit we are OK with it. Honestly its not so hard to see why they fell in so hard with Trump given their true nature e.g: Zuck being the #1 funder of things that will essentially kill the open internet. I'm starting to think it was all fake, just a bunch of Trump-esq BS even before Trump. This comment will be flagged soon and disappear just like anything else that does not support their "Trumpish" view of what the world should be.
- igleria 3mo ago> More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons. I am with you 100% but mockery will not affect their wallets. which is the only thing they care about.
- dan_i 3mo ago[dead]
- stego-tech 3mo agoWe should mock them because others look to us as the subject matter experts. It’s mirror neurons: if we mock these entities, these companies, as the technical experts we are, and we show others why they’re deserving of such mockery, then they will generally replicate those behaviors. You’re more likely to laugh at a comedian when everyone else does, even if you don’t get the joke.
- lpapez 3mo agoWho are you and why should we listen to you banging on the drum? Memento mori.
- maxloh 3mo agoIt is ridiculous that OpenAI is a non-profit and Anthropic is a PBC, yet both actively resist open access to AI. This hinders human progress rather than serving it.
- Levitz 3mo agoYes they only care about money. That's what corporations usually do. And I'll take that 10 times out of 10 over China's role in all of this, which is specifically to disrupt and sabotage the rest. I can trust Anthropic and OpenAI to have economic interests. I can't trust the same from Chinese companies, which I can actually trust to have geopolitic interests.
- SimianSci 3mo agoThis has more to do with two seperate approaches to innovation. One which favors a small handful of firms establishing full control over a monopoly on the market. And another favoring the wilderness of free market economics. The only country with anything to gain or lose here is the United States because it decided to play the game of market domination. Either it ends up with market domination and wins, or it doesnt and loses. China's result will remain what its set out to do, which is to create a technology that will support millions of small bespoke companies unbeholden to a larger firm serving all sectors of the economy.
- Alpha3031 3mo agoAs we all know, the US is entirely free of geopolitical interests, which is why there was a US–Japan trade war in the late 80s.
- commoner 3mo agoI have no reason to care about the interests of these companies. My interests are best served with a competitive selection of open weights models available for my use. OpenAI has the year-old GPT-OSS, and Anthropic has never released any open weights models. Meanwhile, other companies are delivering a steady stream of high-quality open weights models every month, and I'm not going to stop using them just because some other people don't like the country they were developed in.
- dd8601fn 3mo agoI can’t say this enough… Expect the tap on open models to slow and eventually disappear. They don’t exist for altruistic reasons. It’s peculiar to current conditions.
- Varelion 3mo agoWarned by YComb? I got something similar when discussing Flock. Tech companies, in the end of the day, will stand together to suppress dissent under the guise of anything nearing plausible deniability.
- john_strinlai 3mo ago>Warned by YComb? I got something similar when discussing Flock. i was curious, because stego-tech also misrepresented the reason for their mod warning, and yours is the same. you didnt get a warning because you were "discussing flock". its because you made a boring comment about "oligarch slushfund to pay bots" for "pro-flock astroturfing". that's not "discussing flock", its vague accusations of astroturfing. its like, super duper clear in the guidelines that if you suspect astroturfing or botting that you should email the mods so they can investigate it. dang has some pithy line about "mod less, not more when there is a relation to ycomb" and its true. ive ripped on flock plenty of times (fuck flock!). just put some actual substance in your comments.
- iambenm 3mo agoI think it's more about keeping this forum one of the few places where you can have open minded conversations that don't delve into hivemind guided flamewars. Granted, I don't know what got warned or the reason. Anything approaching nuance on other forums gets downvoted to oblivion and attacked if it doesn't fit the particular echo chamber it's in. That just reinforces the echo chamber. HN has to do quite a bit to preserve the culture and keep it from devolving into something like those other places.
- sourcecodeplz 3mo agoit is not just copyrighted works. openai and anthropic and google etc hire PHDs to create datasets by solving problems, writing thinking traces. then they train their models on those datasets. also as another user said, what is this 80+ years to protect some text? its ridiculous
- classified 3mo agoIt's only ridiculous for the big thieves, but if you violate copyright, you'll pay dearly. Calling it ridiculous will not protect you.
- therealpygon 3mo agoThieves…like Anthropic who literally just settled a case for pirating? Those kind of thieves? Always better to name them outright. Anthropic STOLE data for training. Verifiably. Admitted. In court. Then settled.[0] You can also likely assume that OpenAI did too. There simply wasn’t enough data without having done so at least at some point in their corporate history. In fact, I seem to recall they were able to extract Harry Potter text from all the major modes[1] https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/anthropic-copyright-settlement-authors/ https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/anthropic-copyright-settlemen... [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671 [1]
- globalnode 3mo agoI agree with you. I read recently Anthropic had to pay 1.5B in fines for stealing copyrighted works. You know, if us normies get caught stealing, we go to jail and don't get to keep the loot, yet these companies get a slap on the wrist and keep everything. Its tragically hilarious.
- therealpygon 3mo agoYes, loved watching how people constantly got downvoted for warning this is what would happen, then it starts happening and the “yeah but” fluff starts. Corporate apologists all the way down. ClosedAI executive literally posted that the administration should disseminate FUD through various agencies in order to protect their profits. Commodie has been crying wolf for years to protect their profits. Now they are openly literally conspiring to protect their profits. “How could we have seen it coming?!” Easily.
- hashstring 3mo agoYes, and thank China for open AI.
- dang 3mo ago> I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic If you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016842, that's inaccurate, as anyone who follows the link can see. It has nothing to do with being professional, and doesn't relate to any specific topic. It has to do with the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which you're plainly breaking. We want curious conversation here, not indignant fulmination. These are incompatible, because the latter destroys the former the way wildfires destroy parks. Since we don't want HN to turn into scorched earth, we have no choice but to ban accounts that repeatedly post like this. I don't want to ban you, but flagrantly doing again exactly what we just asked you to stop suggests that you don't want to use HN as intended. If that's wrong, and you actually do want to use HN as intended, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.
- figers 3mo ago"been about control and their profit margins." they have no profit margins haha, it's huge piles of cash on fire...