Can you imagine a devtools company deciding, "Actually, no, we're going to police what kind of programs you can compile" ?
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 netiher, at least not in a way relevant to the question here.
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.
At this stage, they certainly have the right to refuse whatever tasks they'd like, but even rightful actions come with consequences.
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).
So frontier AI can monopolize all the silicon in the world, demand they be the only place to run inference, and then strictly control what people do with it. I'm sorry the way you pose it makes it seem like it is some free market.
What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.
It's privately owned and indeed they can set the terms.
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.
Ongoing model distillation to continually improve open weights for distribution is necessary then. Anthropic can choose how their service is used, others are free to improve models based on their training.
My great hope is that we will look back on this as a tiny sliver of time, when everyone couldn't resist the awesome power that came with running our devtools over the internet through megacorps, willingly handing over our code and secrets and dollars, in exchange for those sweet lines of code.
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.
It's the natural consequence of a few companies having all of the compute resources. They can do whatever they want since the alternative for users is to pay out the nose for hardware to run a model that isn't SOTA.
Claude is a commercial service. And much like other services (AWS, Cloudflare, GitHub, etc.), they might boot you off if they feel fire under their feet.
Yeah. My suggestion would be to not give them a dollar. Zero-revenue companies usually don't go far. Better yet, don't even have an account. Having zero MAU is also a pretty terrible for a business.
I can't believe I have to spell this out, but when people make an analogy, they're not saying that the things they are comparing are exactly the same. I'm saying that I paid for my Claude subscription, so it should do the development work I ask it to do.
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.
Anthropic (and others) mass harvested source code from around the internet while ignoring licenses to build their product. That's of course allowed (by them).
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.
Anthropic and others harvest source code from around the internet based on the idea of fair use. The big idea behind fair use is that you are not using the copyrighted material to compete against its owner.
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".
Mark my words: AI will only be allowed to destroy the software engineering profession, but somehow protectionism will be enforced for everything else in the name of “safety” and “fairness”.
So we are going from running your stuff from cloud that randomly closes accounts or charges ridiculous costs to pinpointing arbitrary AI use cases and banning them on a whim. I guess that's progress !?
Indeed, cloud == other peoples computers, with all what it entails.
The most important secret of the atomic bomb was that it could be built at all. That's the same way I feel about Anthropic's products (increasingly, tech demos rather than products, if you go off the happy path.) They've demonstrated what is possible. Now I'm hoping for a fistful of rivals to build functional equivalents.
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.
Easy to see the slippery slope from "safety" to "DRM". Abliterated/open models will become increasingly important for AI freedom if they aren't made illegal first...
Same way you would with missile guidance/targeting software (ITAR in the US, or equivalent in other MTCR countries). You probably wouldn't prosecute individuals running models locally but create a chilling effect by scaring any semi-upstanding citizen from openly hosting/developing models (and no US business would touch it with a 10ft pole).
Some context to this, there's been a bunch of discussion in indie game development spaces about how it might be risky to release demos, or any information really, since a bunch of (probably? can't necessarily assume now.) people seem to immediately try to clone it with agents. It's to the extent I've seen genuine confusion about which game is the original in Twitch streams/chats. There have been a bunch of takes one way or another on it, including 'if your game is clone-able from a demo your idea isn't unique or complex enough'.
So people will be running reverse engineering through openrouter and similar or local inference while Anthropic is severely crippling cyber security usefulness of their products. Feels like own goal.
I'm not sure why it's being limited to just games (it might just be the announcement), but I'm sure vibe-coded stuff like this that people keep happily plastering over every possible social media outlet presumably isn't helping.
That's not even a recreation, it's just the leaked sources of the game recompiled to WASM, so I don't think their prompt would apply to this case.
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"
Interesting - I guess it's hard to say if it would be caught by anthropic censors upstream since we aren't really privy to how broad this new "net" is going to be.
They didn't start with games. At least they had plenty of arbitrary limits for what it wouldn't do usually citing safety. What they do now is introducing a new arbitrary reason - this time because it hurts other deep pocketed buddies, large companies in the gaming industry. You can bet your tokens this isn't where the list of arbitrary reasons ends.
Legal risk from Microsoft and other game makers. Path to success will have to be self hosted open weights imho. Big Tech wants a monopoly on AI revenue, they do not want people cloning what they're gating with IP for enterprise value and cashflows.
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/
(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)
IP protection once again scales with your wallet, where the benefits disproportionately help those who already have the most resources and hinders those with the least.
I wonder how long before people figure out that you can run alliterated models locally on consumer hardware capable of doing all this without help from Sam or Dario.
Damn spell check. I typed it correctly the first time.
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.
I love when those in power so clearly say fuck you because it wakes up a lot more people. Next up is Anthropic stopping you from building software that is similar to existing software owned by any company that can afford the services of an AmLaw 100 law firm.
How can something that provably cannot create and only recycle follow such instructions.
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 can't help themselves but play the Don't be evil[0] in fast-forward.
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.
Hard to imagine this is actually a concern for game makers. Decompilation aside, AI can only produce shallow visual mimicry. If you were to actually try to enjoy these games you'd be miserable nearly instantly.
Rookie move to fight this legally! What replaces it actually will be engaging and competitive. Palworld is just the beginning....
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.
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".
And the courts that ruled fair use.
/s
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50259643
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
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.