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Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 https://x.com/kyliebyte
by rgbrenner 1mo ago
Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46
So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models.
This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider.
It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.
- frankacter 1mo agoYour link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use. That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling. >"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
- rgbrenner 1mo agoCursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access-to-claude/ https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access... And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropic-cuts-windsurfs-claude-access-before-openai-acquisition/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi... So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
- frankacter 1mo agoAgain neither of those links indicated usage that violate TOS beyond being a major competitor. They indiacte their development staff are using it, and they access it via API, then then go on to say all the nefarious things they "could" be doing, stopping before stating they actually are. Specifically the TOS violation was: >customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service" So if you are building a competitive product, that alone is a TOS violation from their perspective. Which is fine and their prerogative, but we shouldn't cast a dark cloud suggesting other violations were happening without stated evidence. OpenAI publicly stated they can't "trust that xAI will use it within terms" not even that they've violated, not that there has been a violation from the Cursor team. https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in-decision-to-drop-cursor-partnership/ https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in... >OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service"
- redox99 1mo ago> if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.
- MangoCoffee 1mo ago>Musk admitted to distilling their models. what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
- consumer451 1mo agoWell, they will stop releasing their latest models, and just attempt to eat all software themselves. Otherwise, it will be competitors distilling, and the government getting upset. It's hard for me to see a different future. And, this really sucks. If this thesis is true, I wonder what the final YC batch number might be.
- lygaret 1mo agoI believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all? Even if they have Astra or whatever completely to themselves, how do they deal with the -product- side? Or sales, or account management? They've been focused on juicing model's coding capabilities, but it's absolutely -not- "gen ai" enough to be doing the whole thing in agents, even 3 or 5 years from now, if only because there's so much context we _can't_ give to these models, without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
- citrin_ru 1mo agoJust guessing - companies which not outsource development to likes of infosys will outsource to OpenAI instead.
- halcy 1mo agoThey don’t need to make you or me, people who actually make software, believe that every anthropic employee is actually and in fact, right now, a „10x software factory controlling thousands of agents“, they need to make investors and CEOs believe, and then hope that making that true is possible and that they can keep the fiction up long enough and get enough money and infra built out to make it actually true.
- ChannelFence 1mo agoi'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer
- archon810 1mo agoAnthropic already said they're definitely still in.
- fhn 1mo agorunning on someone else's server, you're basically giving them your weights.
- brightball 1mo agoAnthropic seems to have no issues: https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20 https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20
- inigyou 1mo agoRemind me to set up public nitter so I can post a nitter link to whatever this is, and then I can read it.
- notpushkin 1mo agoNot being able to read about Musk doing some shit because Musk have done some shit to Nitter is just peak comedy. Just go ahead and do set it up. You’ll be my hero (I don’t have mental capacity to research which jurisdiction works for this right now, but obviously not in US or EU.)
- ben_w 1mo agoI suspect it's better for mental health to be lazy and take this as an opportunity to detox from tweet-sized interactions in general.
- throwaway240403 1mo agoLOL, obviously Space-cursor-xAI-musk-imperial-holdings-inc is providing them compute. They either _can't_ cut them off, or they know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- avazhi 1mo ago[flagged]
- literalAardvark 1mo ago> how can you be on HN and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract Some of us are still employed mate
- avazhi 1mo ago> and authoritatively mouthing off This was pretty pertinent to the meaning of that line, brother.
- literalAardvark 1mo agoThat escaped my notice, because nothing on the internet is "authoritative", doubly so on social media. I thought you were just being dramatic.
- cornholio 1mo agoIt's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using. If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use. They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.
- jimbob45 1mo agoAre you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- alightsoul 1mo agoThey already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?
- lmm 1mo agoOnly any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
- mstade 1mo agoYes. Two wrongs do not make a right.
- nixon_why69 1mo ago
- andy_ppp 1mo agoWhy you would trust Elon Musk to not hack you and steal your model weights is beyond me, but maybe they intend to use that compute just for training, still I’m sure there’s plenty of research there to take too…
- gastonmorixe 1mo agoYou don’t have to: NVIDIA Confidential Computing (GPU-CC) plus a CPU TEE
- blks 1mo agoEspecially when he hires too little people, makes them work 80hrs a week and expect big and fast results
- germandiago 1mo agoNoone is good here. Mr. Altman built a non-profit organization to help humanity, yes, that is what he said at first... This is a battle for power, let us not be naive...
- denkmoon 1mo agoGod I hope so. My workplace enforces Cursor use, and to see it lose GPT and Claude would absolutely make my day. Much has been invested in getting us to "use the right models", a list in which Grok does not feature.
- oblio 1mo agoIsn't Cursor owned by xAI ergo Grok?
- denkmoon 1mo agoExactly. Without Claude and GPT, we'd be limited to Grok. A lot of ink has been spilled telling us exactly how to use Sonnet, Opus, Sol or Luna in certain scenarios, Grok hasn't ever been recommended by our pointy haired friends even once.
- dofm 1mo agoWell isn't that going to be an interesting test of corporate ideology ;-)
- consensus1 1mo agoIt will be a test of what they think about the relative cost / performance of a model is, and not a single thing more than that.
- epolanski 1mo agoGrok 4.5 and 4.6 are very good coding models. Also quite fast.
- Anamon 1mo agoOn the one hand, I'd love to see Cursor/Grok/xAI/SpaceX/Musk disappear forever. On the frustrating other hand, Cursor is the absolute best LLM IDE by such a ridiculously wide margin. Everything else feels so broken and ramshackle in comparison. My employer let us evaulate all the big providers for a month each before having a vote on which one we'd like to keep. Cursor won almost unanimously. (This was before the xAI takeover was even on the horizon, otherwise I would've voted differently myself.)
- stiltzkin 1mo ago[dead]