Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models

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.

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.

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.

The fact that these corporations don’t spontaneously collapse from the sheer weight of irony is a continuing disappointment for me.

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.

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.

> You built your models on the world's data

most important bit…: stealing world's data…

One must wonder about the strength of their “moat” if they feel this sort of thing is necessary.

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.

This is not a ban, but the Opus 5.5 "safeguard" interrupting a query.

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

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.

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?

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.

This is sadly not surprising to me as if you listened to/watched the [Latent Space episode on Opus 5.5](https://latent.space/p/how_anthropic_ships_the_1_llm_in_the_...) 25 minutes into the podcast and instead of talking about how they've released one of the best models in the world, they were busy talking about the changes to the API and why normies must not be trusted to perform inference outside of Dario's blessing.

It's frankly disgusting and really makes me not want to use Anthropic, despite previously feeling aligned with a lot of what Anthropic published.

Kindof old news, they've been doing this for months...

User is based out of Hong Kong. Claude isn't available to Hong Kong so how are they using it?

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.

    > got tagged for "training a competitor,"

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).

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.

end to end encryption to ai chats pls

I have been using it to train a few BERT models.

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

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.

how oddly entitled. they built their non-deterministic black box of bullshit from surreptitiously acquired data. it's cute to see the ignorant thieves attempting to 'protect' their empire of shit.

US Security Chip act next, your GPU will soon enforce these restrictions too