Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
169 points by pretext 6 hours ago | 70 comments

zmmmmm 2 hours ago
It's very clear to me that however much you like Claude and Anthropic models, every professional user shoudl be actively cultivating a set of alternatives and fallbacks to use and seeking to ensure the overall ecosystem is as open, standardised and portable as possible.

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.

reply
amelius 9 minutes ago
Things are about to get even shittier in the near future, when shareholders get involved.
reply
sanex 6 minutes ago
Actually cutting off potential users would probably be counter to short term profit maximization that shareholders care about.
reply
neya 21 minutes ago
It's not just the anti-competitive behaviour, it's also the anti-privacy behaviours that are not muched talked about. They embedded a spyware and got caught too:

https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

But, of course, Dario is the darling of the community and he can do no wrong.

reply
nicce 2 hours ago
They keep doing anti-competitive things over and over again, and the end users seems to refuse to see it. They do whatever they can to get vendor-lock in.
reply
arcanemachiner 34 minutes ago
Oh, I see it. But there is nothing that competes with Opus 5.5 for 90+% of the work I do, so I use Opus 5.5 for that 90%.
reply
pj_mukh 58 minutes ago
What’s the best local analog to Opus 5.5? It’s such a great daily driver.
reply
zmmmmm 19 minutes ago
I think the key part is not to depend on their harness where it operates in proprietary ways. At bare minimum, if you can plugin an OpenAI model or even X or Google model that operates close to the same level, you will have a fallback, even if it isn't an open one itself.

Yes, open models are needed too - the oligopoly is not much less dangerous than the monopoly for some scenarios. But at least if your tool set can switch to those it can probably switch to an open model if it really comes to that.

reply
wds 43 minutes ago
As of today, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Kimi K3.

If you are bound to consumer-obtainable hardware, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. If you are bound to consumer-accessible hardware, Qwen3.8-27b today and Qwen4-27b when it releases next week (Qwen models consistently punch far above their parameter size).

reply
Lwerewolf 36 minutes ago
Flash is runnable in various gpu + cpu offload configurations. Not saying that 27b is bad (far from it, especially if they get n-grams in it with... hopefully today's release), saying that flash is runnable at decent speeds on way less than you'd imagine.

As for opus... I'm the weirdo that refuses to get an ant sub.

reply
wds 19 minutes ago
I wouldn't say it's weird not to subscribe to Anthropic at all. We're in a thread specifically describing a good reason not to!

Any money out of my pocket for third-party AI would either go to highly subsidized services like Google's (I've gotten over $500 in API calls on a $20 subscription I paid $0 for as a student, which also includes GCP credits, CoLab credits, cloud storage, etc.), and once they reign that in and start pricing/offering realistically (Antigravity has been noticably chopped down already since I began using it) I'll switch to API calls from Chinese companies.

reply
arcanemachiner 33 minutes ago
I think Kimi K3.1 steals the crown from K3, no?
reply
wds 28 minutes ago
It would, but they have yet to release its weights! It's an API-only model as of right now.

https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/models?sort=created

reply
mapontosevenths 20 minutes ago
I think they nerfed it for Cyber. So not so much if thats your goal.
reply
arcanemachiner 30 minutes ago
There is nothing open-weight that even comes close IMO. The only half-decent model that 99% of people can actually dream of running locally is Qwen 3.8 27B.
reply
anal_reactor 10 minutes ago
I don't care about my skills because employers won't request me to do anything that violates the terms of service of $CURRENT_LLM. At the same time, it's a reminder not to outsource thinking to someone's computer.
reply
bushido 51 minutes ago
Something I've seen it do recently is refusing to extract services out of my own monolith code base because it finds copying code morally wrong.

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.

reply
roygbiv2 17 minutes ago
I wanted fable to scan an old user profile backup of mine and create a list of folders that were safe to delete. Refused, wanted to fall back to some ancient version of opus. Wtf.
reply
fwlr 2 hours ago
The fact that these corporations don’t spontaneously collapse from the sheer weight of irony is a continuing disappointment for me.
reply
tristanj 4 hours ago
This user is based in Hong Kong, where Claude is geo-blocked and not available. If you try visiting claude.ai from a Hong Kong IP address, you get an "unavailable in this region" message.

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.

reply
leobuskin 4 hours ago
US/EU here (both, due to traveling), same story with anything related to modifying existing weights or SotA approaches in training/research, it's not a geolocation issue. The safeguards don't check your IP (but pretty soon will check someone's IP [pun intended])
reply
alansaber 3 hours ago
I've read writeups about a user trust score and i'd be surprised if it wasn't true, there's no way the safeguard is just a cls in isolation
reply
fwlr 2 hours ago
There’s no way the sandbox is just “only GET, no POST”…
reply
tcdent 2 hours ago
Claude has been building me a bespoke inference and training stack (optimized kernels and all), feeding traces from my previous sessions directly into a LoRA adapter. Zero friction.

I am US based, with defender level cyber access.

reply
digitaltrees 2 hours ago
I am working on something similar if you want to collab
reply
clcaev 3 hours ago
Perhaps a manifest index/list of training data and learning method should be mandatory for “public” use of any model, sort of like food ingredient package labeling. The list of texts used and any weighting seems important to facilitate a public understanding / debate of model expectations and behavior.
reply
byte_0 2 hours ago
This week, I asked Claude Code to generate an MD to continue working on another computer, without losing the context, and it refused claming some sort of extraction. It was only until I selected Opus, that it completed the request.
reply
tlonny 2 hours ago
One must wonder about the strength of their “moat” if they feel this sort of thing is necessary.
reply
ktosobcy 3 hours ago
> You built your models on the world's data

most important bit…: stealing world's data…

reply
jquery 2 hours ago
You wouldn't download a car
reply
TomatoCo 2 hours ago
If what they did isn't stealing then they should have no problem with people training off of them.
reply
simondotau 48 minutes ago
Fairness isn’t the relevant lens. Copyright isn’t the right lens either. This is purely might-makes-right, where the winner is whoever has the best offence and best defence.

It is only hypocritical when they bitch about things being unfair, or try to use copyright arguments in the court system.

reply
gruez 2 hours ago
Well their justification is that distillation is bad because it means baddies can get their own models without their safeguards and then make anthrax nukes or whatever. Even though it's self serving, it's at least self-consistent.
reply
dcl 2 hours ago
Will Claude help me with reinforcement learning code for games? Or is that too small-fry for it to refuse? I've been playing around with RL with the new DeepSeek Flash model but it seems to trip up over itself a bit.
reply
silentkat 2 hours ago
I have been doing RL for Magic the Gathering (longshot but having fun). Several times it triggered this flag. But that was a couple months ago. Everyone went crazy over Astra so I switched to open ai and had no issues. People are now going crazy over opus 5.5 so I’m playing with that.

Haven’t hit any issues so far, but two months in the code is very dirty but functional enough that I’m redoing it with more heavy hand holding.

I recommend having a paper as reference in mind if you don’t already know what you’re doing. I’m referencing the Stratego paper as reading that a year ago gave me the inspiration to try MTG.

Every model I’ve used has had a lot of trouble but if it wasn’t I figure I wouldn’t be having as much fun as I’ve been having or learning so much.

reply
100111011111 60 minutes ago
Ha, I took a side gig training ai models and thought let's use my corporate claude account to help with that, somehow it figured out that this was such a gig(probably because I let it read my emails) and said it'll pass on this one.
reply
schleck8 2 hours ago
This is not a ban, but the Opus 5.5 "safeguard" interrupting a query.
reply
gdiamos 3 hours ago
Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.

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

reply
cisc 2 hours ago
> Where I draw the line is asking Claude to label training data. I don’t do this.

Why draw any line? Anthropic doesn't. They actively take the world's intellectual property, don't pay for it, and put it behind a paywall.

> but I would expect it to refuse sometimes.

Why? Anthropic's dream is to be exempted from copyright altogether. They've been trying to achieve exactly that:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/anthropic...

Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?

reply
gdiamos 2 hours ago
One of my points of my ethical framework is that IP is valuable and should not be stolen.

Another way of saying is that hard work that advances the state of the art should be rewarded. Patents should exist.

I’m sure they are watching what I’m doing and would retaliate via service cut off and legal action if I crossed it egregiously and they found out.

I would do the same thing if a user or employee did this to my IP.

I don’t completely buy the argument of web scraping being an IP violation.

I don’t send my core ip in an email to my main competitors and I don’t post it on the internet.

reply
simondotau 42 minutes ago
We were never this absolutist about intellectual property when individuals were the perpetrators. I don’t feel morally entitled to criticise Big AI for doing what individuals have done for centuries.
reply
cisc 37 minutes ago
No? The United States disagrees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

https://www.thedailybeast.com/aaron-swartzs-unbending-prosec...

If an individual had done what Anthropic continues to do then they would be jailed for life.

reply
cisc 40 minutes ago
> One of my points of my ethical framework is that IP is valuable and should not be stolen.

Anthropic's business model is premised on intellectual property theft. They take it without paying for it.

You are compromising your ethical framework by using Anthropic's products.

reply
kelseyfrog 2 hours ago
> Given they want no restrictions on them, why should there be any restriction on anyone else?

Because corporations are not moral agents; they're economic agents. This arrangement would be great for shareholder, nothing more.

reply
jijji 14 minutes ago
Wonder why they got downgraded to junk status yesterday for their IPO.... the bad taste in everyones mouth might have something to do with it
reply
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago
I'm using it to train models with a novel linear flash attention mechanism right now. No refusals, and it's been running for at least a week solid.

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

reply
JBits 3 hours ago
What sort of data are you getting Claude to generate?
reply
mapontosevenths 23 minutes ago
It's not generating the data directly, just writing code and babysitting while models train.

I suspect that's the difference here. I'm not trying to use Claude to build a competitor. I'm doing small scale research.

reply
throwaway2037 56 minutes ago
The author's homepage: https://jiahao-shao1.github.io/

... 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.
His tweet says:

    > got tagged for "training a competitor,"
I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?

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).

reply
tarpitt 2 hours ago
Holy shit man the lockdown is coming. I've used claude to set up my abliterated qwen local LLM setup, but they're gonna eventually lock that down too.

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.

reply
_3u10 2 hours ago
There’s models other than Claude.
reply
tarpitt 2 hours ago
There are now
reply
wds 30 minutes ago
Qwen3.8-27b matches Opus 4.6's performance and is less than a 32GB download at 8-bit quantization. How would, could that disappear?

Even if you take it down, you can just torrent it.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:151e277c267b3b4880ae93ef405977009599a6f3&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateface.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateface.co%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=https%3A%2F%2Fpirateface.co%2Fapi%2Fws%2FQwen%2FQwen3.8-27B-FP8%2F017b9c7af6b5689d5dd426a76e0bc077eb5ca20a%2F

reply
Buttons840 2 hours ago
If anyone out there wants to pay for my LLM bill, I'll record and send you all the outputs they generate in exchange (perhaps with some exceptions).

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?

reply
nubinetwork 4 hours ago
Kindof old news, they've been doing this for months...
reply
pkoird 4 hours ago
Better block than falsify information. Last I heard they were deliberately botching it whenever someone asked semi-advanced questions on model training.
reply
jbellis 3 hours ago
They walked that part back within days. Still made me permanently leery off relying on anthropic for anything important.
reply
dominotw 4 hours ago
so models can reveal "advanced" model building secrets ? how?

How is it a secret if everyone has a model that is exactly like the other. Surely there are no secrets

reply
impossiblefork 3 hours ago
It could be simple training tips that are obvious, but which any particular builder might miss.
reply
nostrebored 3 hours ago
I don’t think it is revelation, it feels like active incompetence. You can lay out every decision and watch Claude/OpenAI actively fuck up in inexplicable ways.
reply
georgemcbay 4 hours ago
> Surely there are no secrets

Not yet, especially not with all of the incestuous cross-hiring that all the labs do.

But perhaps the various L. Bob Rife variants running these labs are using their advanced unreleased models to work on their own Snow Crashes.

reply
giancarlostoro 4 hours ago
I have been using it to train a few BERT models.
reply
alansaber 3 hours ago
I doubt BERT would trip safeguards
reply
cft 2 hours ago
There have been a lot of write-ups about the future of AI. I see two distinct futures:

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.

reply
gattr 2 hours ago
3. LLMs are fully commoditized, your country funds training of SoTA models, your town runs them in the municipal data center; everything tax-funded. You can use them for a modest fee, as easily as taking a train. When interacting with those LLMs, your privacy is guaranteed by law.
reply
iAMkenough 56 minutes ago
How many municipalities offer the services of ISPs? I know it’s not zero, but decades of private ISPs leading the market leads me to believe municipal data centers won’t be made available to residents.

How often would municipal data centers need to upgrade/replace hardware? What impact would that have on local tax levy rates?

Would you choose to relocate your family to the next town over because they have more available RAM?

reply
WhereIsTheTruth 4 hours ago
US Security Chip act next, your GPU will soon enforce these restrictions too
reply
skeledrew 3 hours ago
Nice. Push more people to use Chinese chips.
reply
dgellow 2 hours ago
What when China starts doing the same?
reply
skeledrew 2 hours ago
They won't. No reason to.
reply