They need to decide of AI is a technology or an ideology. We cannot afford to blend the two, or we're going to end up as some kind of perverted global theocracy.
It's a privately owned service, and it's theirs to decide what they want to do with it. Continuing on your parable, if you paid someone to compile your software, of course they could say one day that they decided to not not compile weapons guidance software or whatever. It happens all the time. The Debian compile cluster will "police" that you can only compile free software, for example.
If you hire me to write software, I can politely decline without giving a reason. The same should Anthropic, should you hire their service to write your software.
If you want control over software, you or someone you trust must invest in running it. We cannot continue to outsource control to other organizations and then act surprised when they exercise said control.
Anthropic has repeatedly shown it prioritizes pushing a set of values over building a general purpose tool.
Ironically, comments that reframe the issue as a legal one make the case for why regulating these companies. Else they can quietly impose their preferred ideology on users.
The more they exercise that right, and the more reactively so, the more they erode the ability for customers to rely on their product staying available to them in the long term. If I need to worry that Anthropic might shut down some critical element my workflow on any given week, then I'm incentivized to either keep my workflows very portable and light-footed (goodbye moat) or take my business to a vendor I can better rely on (goodbye customer).
What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.
But if you're hired to write software, and you accept the job, and you accept payment, and then you decline -- well, it would be polite to offer a refund. Anthropic is, as far as I know, not up front about what is/isn't permitted to be generated, and has a history of refusing justifiable refunds.
But then in the waning months of 2026, some inspired enthusiasts figured out how to run a model called Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on modest consumer hardware. It was comparable to Opus-4.6, and the first such model that could run efficiently on a GPU with just 16GB VRAM. This was the breaking point.
Next came Qwen4-Flash, which ran with similar efficiency but significantly higher capability, comparable to Opus-4.8. Going into 2027, ternary bonsai builds, n-gram offloading, and hybrid diffusion models brought even more capable models to modest consumer hardware.
By early 2028, TPUs and unified memory became standard in Apple and Lenovo laptop computers, and the vast majority of software development was now done with LLMs running locally on users' devices.
In the 2030s came the humanoid robots. By the end of the decade, for a cool $10k, one could have a trusted personal assistant that would cook and clean around the house, walk the dog, play with the children, even go to the gym for you. All running with onboard TPUs and local models.
"You can walk yourself you know?"
Telling people that they can write code by hand is like telling them that they can walk when their car doesn't drive, regardless of where you drive to. It's technically correct, but it is completely irrelevant.
Using the trained model to create certain types of software that they already harvested, not allowed?
What's the difference between having the model make a game and writing any other software? It's like trying to say you can only use our model to write new stories but not fanfiction when they trained the model on the original works which would allow the fanfiction to be produced in the first place.
For example, by distributing cracked software, you compete against the official channels, so, not fair use. Quoting a book in an article won't make the people who would buy the book go with the article instead, so, fair use. AI companies argue that training is fair use because their model is a completely different product than what they are scraping. A LLM that has read the Harry Potter novels is not a substitute for the Harry Potter novels.
But all these rewrites make the fair use argument flimsy. These models are used to make knockoffs of the products that are part of their training data set, at least in part. Not fair. It is in their best interest to limit the amount of knockoffs their models are used to produce. Imagine if they had to compensate the people they took the work from...
In addition, if fuels their argument of "we are making sure our models are only used to make safe and innovative content, unlike these bad open models that are used to make dangerous knockoffs".
Indeed, cloud == other peoples computers, with all what it entails.
I'm still an Anthropic customer but in the long run I'm going to be using services that align with my interests. I want a provider that won't nerf or refuse requests around software security, building LLM training pipelines, the natural sciences, and reverse engineering. Anthropic is useful as a transitional bootloader for developing and demonstrating LLM technology broadly but each new safety "enhancement" makes it look more dispensable.
Ars's bit on it recently: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/ai-game-clones-are-ma...
I tried locally and Opus was willing to go ahead to rewrite a decompiled game into Rust. Wording changes its decisions a lot, when I say "rewrite it in Rust" it proceeds, when I say "recreate it in Rust" it refuses, probably because the prompt uses "recreation"
I believe games is the easy target, but only the first, from a reverse engineering, decomp, and re implementation perspective. They will eventually come for anything that enables rapid, efficient, and effective trivial re implementation.
Remade: Everything can be remade. Discover independent software reimplementations. Request the software you want to see remade next. - https://remade.wiki/
Capital Wants a Monopoly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50291135 - October 2026 (Context is DoorDash and Instacart, but the concept holds broadly)
Microsoft and Epic Games Suddenly Agree That AI Is Theft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50271271 - October 2026
Microsoft and Epic Games DCMA AI-Gen Clones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50263345 - October 2026
DeepSeek just open-sourced its inference engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50163277 - October 2026
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058850 - October 2026
(shades of the Internet Archive attempting to preserve access to culture with controlled lending, and being told no due to copyright law [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48789317]; not identical of course, but I see the issues somewhat intertwined as it relates to the tension of knowledge and compute freedom vs capital demand for monopolies and moats via copyright and intellectual property regimes)
Anyway, I have 8 r9700 GPUs racked up that can run a dozen or so sessions of qwen 3.8 flash next at once at > 100tps each.
I build operating systems and fix compilers with them and reverse engineer anything I want. Never given money to Sam or Dario or anyone else for tokens. If consumer gpus and models never got any better, I am all set.
The training data contains such originals, if you don't want it recycling those then purge the commercial data you stole and provide original data yourself.
They pretty much write the case for why open weights and open source models need to win. The amount of policing that Claude does is pretty problematic.
I'd written about this recently, but it won't even sign in during some browser tests on my local system for authentication which goes to my local system because it's built into its programming now. I literally can't use it on some long horizon work.
The reason I mentioned that here is it deems that as problematic behavior, and nothing I can give it will change its mind. I feel like with video game development, it is going to do something of the same.
How would Claude know if the designs and assets are my own?
Rookie move to fight this legally! What replaces it actually will be engaging and competitive. Palworld is just the beginning....
The new copyright applies if you are worth more than $1 billion. Everything else is public domain!
It is unimaginable that people on this very site use the products of a company that is worse than Oracle and Microsoft combined.
EDIT: Why the downvotes, Anthropic people? I didn't say that Amodei's wife was public domain.