I understand what is being implied. I'm saying that the provided example is poor evidence of what's being implied.
We all know Meta can already track things like certain purchases. A skill file telling AI how to format purchase history in markdown format is not going to help any of Meta's ads or RecSys systems.
You can believe Meta does bad things without thinking everything Meta does is an example of said bad things
Which was caused by the exact problem they’re trying to avoid by not going on a spending spree to increase manufacturing capacity.
They had built way too much capacity during the 90s and were losing money on every chip because they couldn’t run the fabs at full capacity. That’s why they colluded to increase the price to save their collective hides.
A new competitor wouldn’t be able to enter the market and lower the prices without also losing money. That’s not the case today, the Chinese are trying hard to do just that.
Conspiracies have been documented enough times that it is totally valid to surmise that there's one in place at any given time, about any given field.
A quick inquiry to google on 'proven conspiracy theories' returned ten results just on google's AI. And it left out Iran-contra -presumably for the sake of brevity.
Sorry, to think there's a conspiracy isn't so whacky and unhinged as people want to make it out to be.
Where did you get "trying to dictate" from? The text is "the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert [...]"
A mutually agreed upon "you may not use our product for X or Y purpose" in a contract clearly doesn't pose any such risk.
Trying to argue for and enforce a 'you may not use our product for an express objective of the US military' provision is pretty clearly "trying to dictate". Actively cancelling, moving capabilities behind a 'safety' wall, or even threatening to would be a clear sabotage of the US military's operational capabilities. It'd be one thing is Anthropic merely expressed an opinion, but my understanding is that it was/is an outright 'we will not allow' as opposed to a 'we'd prefer you didn't'.
Imagine if Microsoft tried the same with excel or power point. "um actually in the fine print of the EULA it says you may not use our product for military purposes so we will revoke your access unless you stop using power point for mission briefings that might result in the deaths of civilians". Would fly about as well as a lead brick.
Again, the statute says nothing about "dictating terms." It covers an adversary who might sabotage or subvert a system. And no, Anthropic did not cancel anything, did not pull any capabilities, and has no backdoor into deployed models. There was no "um actually." It wrote two prominent usage restrictions into a contract, the military read and signed it, and then later demanded the terms be removed.
As a sanity check, I’d highly recommend trying out your own line of reasoning in cases which you think you might feel differently about. For example, imagine it's instead a certain authoritarian state saying "obey the Party or get blacklisted as a national security threat."
It might feel good in the moment, like "yeah, Anthropic, don't tell the military what to do," because you agree with this particular call. But the government doesn't give that power back, and you might not be so happy about the next way it gets used.
Let’s not kid ourselves, Anthropic would be running their own distillation “attacks” too if _they_ were the ones playing catch-up. They’ve already shown as much with their illegal scraping of pirated books ($1.5B settlement).
I say just let them duke it out. After a decade of regulatory capture and enshittification, it’s nice to see some actual competition again.
> Anthropic would be running their own distillation “attacks” too if _they_ were the ones playing catch-up
Probably. But if OpenAI or Anthropic stole your credit card to purchase tokens you could sue them. You won't get a cent from any Chinese labs.
> it’s nice to see some actual competition again.
Competition benefits everyone. But this isn't fair competition. A German startup cannot legally do any of these tactics required to bypass Anthropic/OAI's counter-measures. Which makes EU less competitive and therefore less investment in European AI.
I said it in my original comment. That is the moat. The reason frontier AI is a two horse race. European labs cannot gain ground because the only way to do it is illegally.
Your original comment painted it as a China moat against US/EU labs. Completely different from instead being a unique disadvantage to EU labs by which the US labs, among others, aren't really affected.
The European labs are distinctly disadvantaged. US labs scraped the entire internet and downloaded copyrighted works to train their models and just paid a fine. They get 99% of all investment money in AI because of the lead they hold. Chinese labs also scrape the internet, download copyrighted works, and launch massive distillation campaigns using stolen accounts and credit cards. They get full support and funding from the PRC.
Europe gets barely any funding because it is so far behind and cannot use the illegal strategies Chinese labs use to distill Opus/Astra. Mistral cannot compete because the competition is literally breaking every law.
Not that I have a solution, but isn’t that kind of disappointing? Why don’t we just do it directly, rather than only as a side effect of needless conflicts?
I found it much more useful to go to a knife shop and handle a whole bunch of knives for myself. They’re all pretty similar besides material, so not much signal you’re going to be able to glean from people arguing on reddit.
Most of the attributes don’t matter. Most people would be much better off with a $50 Victorinox that they kept sharp and a wood cutting board they maintained than upgrading the knife. If you are using it all day there are definitely looking things from a comfort perspective but for most homes, does not matter.
That's called taking responsibility for your actions and being an informed consumer or a critical thinker.
Unfortunately that is completely undoable for most people nowadays. That's seen as "too much work" for most people. That's something that people see as a waste of time and should be done by something else for them. A knife should be a 5 second one-click buy, then when it sucks people will complain that all their options are bad.
You spent time/money traveling to a shop? In 2026!? Omg what a waste of time! Why didn't you aggregate the 500 product review sites and Reddit comments to pick 5 possible knives? (Sarcasm)
I’d give it a bit more credit than that. They encoded 128 flags with their scheme, only 5 of which have the union jack. The rest are truly built from scratch.
While in fairness the remaining flags seem like they would need more hard coded symbols, it’s still interesting as a procedural plausible flag generator.
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