Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.

What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.

But its refusal to work pattern is getting pretty obnoxious. Another one I ran into last week was it refused to start a developer session to do browser testing for a code base it was working on because signing in was suddenly against it's programming.

It listed all the conditions it needed for a sign in to be possible, agreed that my code base met all conditions, but refused to progress. I tried it in multiple fresh sessions with the same result.

They are likely accessing Claude via a VPN. Doing model training work over a VPN is a highly suspicious signal, and likely triggers Anthropic's classifiers. It's not surprising that their account got flagged.

most important bit…: stealing world's data…

I ask it questions about large models like big MoEs all the time. I’ve never had it refuse a question, but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.

For training data from existing models I just get open models to spill their guts. It’s fine

In industry we train employees to not reveal proprietary information.

I think it would be easier to do this for a model than a lot of employees

It's frankly disgusting and really makes me not want to use Anthropic, despite previously feeling aligned with a lot of what Anthropic published.

I suspect this person was actively using it to generate or classify training data directly.

I mean, these AI companies have money, and they want data. I have data, and I want money. Maybe we can work something out.

In a world where buying and selling data is central to entire industries, why shouldn't I gather and sell my own data?

... says:

    > My research aims to build a general-purpose agent that can understand, reason, and act in the physical world — at the intersection of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and embodied AI.

    > got tagged for "training a competitor,"

Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).

I wanted to finetune it a bit, I wonder if I am gonna have to dogfood if claude refuses to help me.

If you don't have a local LLM setup you're gonna be permanant local LLM-less underclass.

1. You get ID'd and biometrically scanned to be able to use powerful AI, and after you get de-platformed by an opaque censorship system, you are a digital bum. Same life as homeless now: they cannot even open a bank account because they don't have an address.

2. Local models win, perhaps with the assistance of Apple, and people run suffiently powerful models on the client computers.

My bet is on 1.