[JohnnyMarcone]

I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.

It appears they trend in the right direction:

- Have not kissed the Ring.

- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).

- Committing to no ads.

- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]

The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]

- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])

It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.

I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

[1]https://archive.is/Pm2QS

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...

[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

[4]https://archive.is/4NGBE

[mrdependable]

Being the 'good guy' is just marketing. It's like a unique selling point for them. Even their name alludes to it. They will only keep it up as long as it benefits them. Just look at the comments from their CEO about taking Saudi money.

Not that I've got some sort of hate for Anthropic. Claude has been my tool of choice for a while, but I trust them about as much as I trust OpenAI.

[JohnnyMarcone]

How do you parse the difference between marketing and having values? I have difficulty with that and I would love to understand how people can be confident one way or the other. In many instances, the marketing becomes so disconnected from actions that it's obvious. That hasn't happen with Anthropic for me.

[rhubarbtree]

What evidence do you have for that? Your point about Saudi is literally mentioned by the parent as one of the few negative points.

I’m not saying this is how it will play out, but this reads as lazy cynicism - which is a self-realising attitude and something I really don’t admire about our nerd culture. We should be aiming higher.

[qudat]

Agreed. Companies don’t have the capacity to be moral entities. They are driven purely based on monetary incentives. They are mechanical machinery. People are anthropomorphizing values onto companies or being duped by marketing speak.

[zombot]

> but I trust them about as much as I trust OpenAI.

So, ideally, not at all?

[libraryofbabel]

I mean, yes and. Companies may do things for broadly marketing reasons, but that can have positive consequences for users and companies can make committed decisions that don't just optimize for short term benefits like revenue or share price. For example, Apple's commitment to user privacy is "just marketing" in a sense, but it does benefit users and they do sacrifice sources of revenue for it and even get into conflicts with governments over the issue.

And company execs can hold strong principles and act to push companies in a certain direction because of them, although they are always acting within a set of constraints and conflicting incentives in the corporate environment and maybe not able to impose their direction as far as they would like. Anthropic's CEO in particular seems unusually thoughtful and principled by the standards of tech companies, although of course as you say even he may be pushed to take money from unsavory sources.

Basically it's complicated. 'Good guys' and 'bad guys' are for Marvel movies. We live in a messy world and nobody is pure and independent once they are enmeshed within a corporate structure (or really, any strong social structure). I think we all know this, I'm not saying you don't! But it's useful to spell it out.

And I agree with you that we shouldn't really trust any corporations. Incentives shift. Leadership changes. Companies get acquired. Look out for yourself and try not to tie yourself too closely to anyone's product or ecosystem if it's not open source.

[yoyohello13]

At the end of the day, the choices in companies we interact with is pretty limited. I much prefer to interact with a company that at least pays lip service to being 'good' as opposed to a company that is actively just plain evil and ok with it.

That's the main reason I stick with iOS. At least Apple talks about caring about privacy. Google/Android doesn't even bother to talk about it.

[Jayakumark]

They are the most anti-opensource AI Weights company on the planet, they don't want to do it and don't want anyone else to do it. They just hide behind safety and alignment blanket saying no models are safe outside of theirs, they wont even release their decommissioned models. Its just money play - Companies don't have ethics , the policies change based on money and who runs it - look at google - their mantra once was Don't be Evil.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-o...

Also codex cli, Gemini cli is open source - Claude code will never be - it’s their moat even though 100% written by ai as the creator says it never will be . Their model is you can use ours be it model or Claude code but don’t ever try to replicate it.

[skerit]

They don't even want people using OpenCode with their Max subscriptions (which OpenAI does allow, kind of)

[throwaw12]

I am on the opposite side of what you are thinking.

- Blocking access to others (cursor, openai, opencode)

- Asking to regulate hardware chips more, so that they don't get good competition from Chinese labs

- partnerships with palantir, DoD as if it wasn't obvious how these organizations use technology and for what purposes.

at this scale, I don't think there are good companies. My hope is on open models, and only labs doing good in that front are Chinese labs.

[mym1990]

The problem is that "good" companies cannot succeed in a landscape filled with morally bad ones, when you are in a time of low morality being rewarded. Competing in a rigged market by trying to be 100% morally and ethically right ends up in not competing at all. So companies have to pick and choose the hills they fight on. If you take a look at how people are voting with their dollars by paying for these tools...being a "good" company doesn't seem to factor much into it on aggregate.

[signatoremo]

No good companies for you, yet you bet on Chinese labs! Even if you have no moral problems at all with the China authoritarian, Chinese companies are as morally trustworthy as American ones. That is clear.

As it’s often said: there is no such thing as free product, you are the product. AI training is expensive even for Chinese companies.

[esbranson]

> Blocking access

> Asking to regulate hardware chips more

> partnerships with [the military-industrial complex]

> only labs doing good in that front are Chinese labs

That last one is a doozy.

[derac]

I agree, they seem to be following the Apple playbook. Make a closed off platform and present yourself as morally superior.

[Zambyte]

They are the only AI company more closed than OpenAI, which is quite a feat. Any "commitment" they make should only be interpreted as marketing until they rectify this. The only "good guys" in AI are the ones developing inference engines that let you run models on your own hardware. Any individual model has some problems, but by making models fungible and fully under the users control (access to weights) it becomes a possible positive force for the user.

[falloutx]

>I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.

There are no good guys, Anthropic is one of the worst of the AI companies. Their CEO is continuously threatening all of the white collar workers, they have engineering playing the 100x engineer game on Xitter. They work with Palantir and support ICE. If anything, chinese companies are ethically better at this point.

[delaminator]

Even in CNN polling the majority of US citizens support ICE.

Perhaps your moral bubble is not universal.

[insane_dreamer]

I don’t know about “good guys” but the fact that they seem to be highly focused on coding rather than general purpose chat bot (hard to overcome chatGPT mindshare there) they have a customer base that is more willing to pay for usage and therefore are less likely to need to add an ad revenue stream. So yes so far I would say they are on stronger ground than the others.

[skybrian]

When powerful people, companies, and other organizations like governments do a whole lot of very good and very bad things, figuring out whether this rounds to “more good than bad” or “more bad than good” is kind of a fraught question. I think Anthropic is still in the “more good than bad” range, but it doesn’t make sense to think about it along the lines of heros versus villains. They’ve done things that I put in the “seems bad” column, and will likely do more. Also more good things, too.

They’re moving towards becoming load-bearing infrastructure and then answering specific questions about what you should do about it become rather situational.

[deaux]

They're 16% owned by Google and Amazon, so they're already a minimum of 16% "bad guys".

[rowyourboat]

Remember when OpenAI was about not-for-profit AI development for the betterment of humanity?

[easterncalculus]

> Committing to no ads.

No one who believes this should be in any position of authority in the AI space. Anthropic's marketing BS has basically been taken as fact on this website since they started and it's just so tiring to watch this industry fall for the same nonsense over and over and over again.

Anthropic is younger. That's why they're not doing ads. As soon as they actually reach the spending to (not) reach their AGI goals they will start running ads and begging the taxpayer for even more money.

[adriand]

> I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

I’m very pleased they exist and have this mindset and are also so good at what they do. I have a Max subscription - my most expensive subscription by a wide margin - and don’t resent the price at all. I am earnestly and perhaps naively hoping they can avoid enshittification. A business model where I am not the product gives me hope.

[nilkn]

Anthropic was founded by OpenAI defectors who said OpenAI's product strategy was too dangerous and needed more safety research. But in reality Anthropic has almost exactly the same product strategy. A lot of this is just marketing to raise money to make the founders billionaires rather than the multi-millionaires they only would've been if they hadn't founded a competitor.

[astrange]

Anthropic hasn't released image or video generation models. Seems pretty different to me.

Claude is somewhat sycophantic but nowhere near 4o levels. (or even Gemini 3 levels)

[hackernews90210]

I am not sure, if it will turn out to be.

I always find the CEO using hype and fear as his marketing strategy. A year ago, he came out and said, "Blood-bath" for white collar jobs. It seems to create some sense of anxiety in the receiving end.

[agluszak]

In Poland, before the last presidential election, a member of one candidate’s campaign team had a moment of accidental honesty. Asked whether his candidate would pledge not to raise taxes after winning, he replied: “Well, what’s the harm in promising?”

[raincole]

Google was the 'good guy.' Until it isn't.

Hell, OpenAI was the good guy.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

I can't see how Google turned to become evil or how OpenAI did for that matter.

Google delivered on their promise, and OpenAI well it's too soon but it's looking good.

The name OpenAI and its structure is a relic from a world where the sentiment was to be heavily preoccupied and concerned by the potential accidental release of an AGI.

Now that it's time for products the name and the structure are no longer serving the goal

[4d4m]

On not having kissed the ring - the board appointments and nat sec appointments indicate to me this is not true, thoughts?

[cedws]

Their move of disallowing alternative clients to use a Claude Code subscription pissed me off immensely. I triggered a discussion about it yesterday[0]. It’s the opposite of the openness that led software to where it is today. I’m usually not so bothered about such things, but this is existential for us engineers. We need to scrutinise this behaviour from AI companies extra hard or we’re going to experience unprecedented enshittification. Imagine a world where you’ve lost your software freedoms and have no ability to fight back because Anthropic’s customers are pumping out 20x as many features as you.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873708

[2001zhaozhao]

Anthropic's move of disallowing opencode is quite offputting to me because there really isn't a way to interpret it as anything other than a walled-garden move that abuses their market position to deliberately lock in users.

Opencode ought to have similar usage patterns to Claude Code, being a very similar software (if anything Opencode would use fewer tokens as it doesn't have some fancy features from Claude Code like plan files and background agents). Any subscription usage pattern "abuses" that you can do with Opencode can also be done by running Claude Code automatically from the CLI. Therefore restricting Opencode wouldn't really save Anthropic money as it would just move problem users from automatically calling Opencode to automatically calling CC. The move seems to purely be one to restrict subscribers from using competing tools and enforce a vertically-integrated ecosystem.

In fact, their competitor OpenAI has already realized that Opencode is not really dissimilar from other coding agents, which is why they are comfortable officially supporting Opencode with their subscription in the first place. Since Codex is already open-source and people can hack it however they want, there's no real downside for OpenAI to support other coding agents (other than lock-in). The users enter through a different platform, use the service reasonably (spending a similar amount of tokens as they would with Codex), and OpenAI makes profit from these users as well as PR brownie points for supporting an open ecosystem.

In my mind being in control of the tools I use is a big feature when choosing an AI subscription and ecosystem to invest into. By restricting Opencode, Anthropic has managed to turn me off from their product offerings significantly, and they've managed to do so even though I was not even using Opencode. I don't care about losing access to a tool I'm not using, but I do care about what Anthropic signals with this move. Even if it isn't the intention to lock us in and then enshittify the product later, they are certainly acting like it.

The thing is, I am usually a vote-with-my-wallet person who would support Anthropic for its values even if they fall behind significantly compared to competitors. Now, unless they reverse course on banning open-source AI tools, I will probably revert to simply choosing whichever AI company is ahead at any given point.

I don't know whether Anthropic knows that they are pissing off their most loyal fanbase of conscientious consumers a lot with these moves. Sure, we care about AI ethics and safety, but we also care about being treated well as consumers.

[b3ing]

Too late for that, they came out and said they will train on anything you type in there months ago

[drawfloat]

They work with the US military.

[mhb]

Defending the US. So?

[romanovcode]

> - Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]

> The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]

Dude, you cannot put these two sentences together. The defense department was either a fluke or a PR stunt. If they partner with Palintir they absolutely do not care that their tech is going to be used for killing and other horrible deeds.

A company with morals (which does not exist BTW) would never partner with Palintir.

[marxisttemp]

I think I’m not allowed to say what I think should happen to anyone who works with Palantir.

[fragmede]

Maybe you could use an LLM to clean up what you want to say

[threetonesun]

Given that LLMs essentially stole business models from public (and not!) works the ideal state is they all die in favor of something we can run locally.

[mirekrusin]

Anthropic settled with authors of stolen work for $1.5b, this case is closed, isn't it?