[HN Gopher] Claude is a space to think
___________________________________________________________________
Claude is a space to think
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 312 points
Date : 2026-02-04 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| mynti wrote:
| I think this says a lot about the business approach of Anthopic
| compared to OpenAI. Just the vast amount of free messages you get
| from OpenAI is crazy that turning a profit with that seems
| impossible. Anthropic is growing more slowly but it seems like
| they are not running a crazy deficit. They do not need to put ads
| or porn in their chatbot
| raahelb wrote:
| > Anthropic is focused on businesses, developers, and helping our
| users flourish. Our business model is straightforward: we
| generate revenue through enterprise contracts and paid
| subscriptions, and we reinvest that revenue into improving Claude
| for our users. This is a choice with tradeoffs, and we respect
| that other AI companies might reasonably reach different
| conclusions.
|
| Very diplomatic of them to say "we respect that other AI
| companies might reasonably reach different conclusions" while
| also taking a dig at OpenAI on their youtube channel
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| 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
| skybrian wrote:
| 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.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| I think I'm not allowed to say what I think should happen to
| anyone who works with Palantir.
| fragmede wrote:
| Maybe you could use an LLM to clean up what you want to say
| mrdependable wrote:
| 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.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > and even get into conflicts with governments over the
| issue.
|
| To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for
| immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to
| censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in
| both Apple and most governments' best interests to _appear_
| like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and
| domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and
| purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the _San
| Bernardino_ kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked
| and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated
| of suspicion. I don 't think this is a moral failing of
| anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's
| relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's
| morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for
| that.
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-
| admits-to-...
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| 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.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Companies, not begin sentient, don't have values, only
| their leaders/employees do. The question then becomes "when
| are the humans free to implement their values in their
| work, and when aren't they". You need to inspecting
| ownership structure, size, corporate charter and so on, and
| realize that it varies with time and situation.
|
| Anthropic being a PBC probably helps.
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| >Companies, not begin sentient, don't have values, only
| their leaders/employees do
|
| Isn't that a distinction without a difference? Every real
| world company has employees, and those people _do_ have
| values (well, except the psychopaths).
| mrdependable wrote:
| I am a fairly cynical person. Anthropic could have made
| this statement at any time, but they chose to do it when
| OpenAI says they are going to start showing ads, so view it
| in that context. They are saying this to try to get people
| angry about ads to drop OpenAI and move to Anthropic. For
| them, not having ads supports their current objective.
|
| When you accept the amount of investments that these
| companies have, you don't get to guide your company based
| on principles. Can you imagine someone in a boardroom
| saying, "Everyone, we can't do this. Sure it will make us a
| ton of money, but it's wrong!" Don't forget, OpenAI had a
| lot of public goodwill in the beginning as well. Whatever
| principles Dario Amodei has as an individual, I'm sure he
| can show us with his personal fortune.
|
| Parsing it is all about intention. If someone drops coffee
| on your computer, should you be angry? It depends on if
| they did it on purpose, or it was an accident. When a
| company posts a statement that ads are incongruous to their
| mission, what is their intention behind the message?
| thinkling wrote:
| Ideally, ethical buyers would cause the market to line up
| behind ethical products. For that to be possible, we have
| to have choices available to us. Seems to me Anthropic is
| making such a choice available to see if buyers will line
| up behind it.
| kvirani wrote:
| Wow. Well said.
| haritha-j wrote:
| I believe in "too big to have values". No company that has
| grown beyond a certain size has ever had true values. Only
| shareholder wealth maximisation goals.
| Computer0 wrote:
| People have values, Corporations do not.
| bigyabai wrote:
| No company has values. Anthropic's resistance to the
| administration is only as strong as their incentive to
| resist, and that incentive is money. Their execs love the
| "Twitter vs Facebook" comparison that makes Sam Altman look
| so evil and gives them a relative halo effect. To an
| extent, Sam Altman revels in the evil persona that makes
| him appear like the _Darth Vader_ of some amorphous
| emergent technology. Both are very profitable optics to
| their respective audiences.
|
| If you lend any amount of real-world credence to the value
| of marketing, you're already giving the ad what it wants.
| This is (partially) why so many businesses pivoted to viral
| marketing and Twitter/X outreach that _feels_ genuine, but
| requires only basic rhetorical comprehension to appease
| your audience. "Here at WhatsApp, we care deeply about
| human rights!" *audience loudly cheers*
| cedws wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| adriand wrote:
| > 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| Jayakumark wrote:
| 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.
| Epitaque wrote:
| For the sake of me seeing if people like you understand the
| other side, can you try steelmanning the argument that open
| weight AI can allow bad actors to cause a lot of harm?
| 10xDev wrote:
| "please do all the work to argue my position so I don't
| have to".
| Epitaque wrote:
| I wouldn't mind doing my best steelman of the open source
| AI if he responds (seriously, id try).
|
| Also, your comment is a bit presumptuous. I think society
| has been way too accepting of relying on services behind
| an online API, and it usually does not benefit the
| consumer.
|
| I just think it's really dumb that people argue
| passionately about open weight LLMs without even
| mentioning the risks.
| Jayakumark wrote:
| Since you asked for it, here is my steelman argument :
| Everything can cause harm - it depends on who is holding
| it , how determined are they , how easy is it and what
| are the consequences. Open source will make this super
| easy and cheap. 1. We are already seeing AI Slop
| everywhere Social media Content, Fake Impersonation - if
| the revenue from whats made is larger than cost of making
| it , this is bound to happen, Open models can be run
| locally with no control, mostly it can be fine tuned to
| cause damage - where as closed source is hard as vendors
| might block it. 2. Less skilled person can exploit or
| create harmful code - who otherwise could not have. 3.
| Remove Guards from a open model and jailbreak, which
| can't be observed anymore (like a unknown zero day
| attack) since it may be running private. 4. Almost
| anything digital can be Faked/Manipulated from
| Original/Overwhelmed with false narratives so they can
| rank better over real in search.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| I would not consider myself an expert on LLMs, at least not
| compared to the people who actually create them at
| companies like Anthropic, but I can have a go at a
| steelman:
|
| LLMs allow hostile actors to do wide-scale damage to
| society by significantly decreasing the marginal cost and
| increasing the ease of spreading misinformation,
| propaganda, and other fake content. While this was already
| possible before, it required creating large troll farms of
| real people, semi-specialized skills like photoshop, etc. I
| personally don't believe that AGI/ASI is possible through
| LLMs, but if you do that would magnify the potential damage
| tenfold.
|
| Closed-weight LLMs can be controlled to prevent or at least
| reduce the harmful actions they are used for. Even if you
| don't trust Anthropic to do this alone, they are a large
| company beholden to the law and the government can audit
| their performance. A criminal or hostile nation state
| downloading an open weight LLM is not going to care about
| the law.
|
| This would not be a particularly novel idea - a similar
| reality is already true of other products and services that
| can be used to do widespread harm. Google "Invention
| Secrecy Act".
| wavemode wrote:
| The steelman argument is that super-intelligent AGI could
| allow any random person to build destructive technology, so
| companies on the path toward creating that ought to be very
| careful about alignment, safety and, indeed, access to
| weights.
|
| The obvious assumed premise of this argument is that
| Anthropic are actually on the path toward creating super-
| intelligent AGI. Many people, including myself, are
| skeptical of this. (In fact I would go farther - in my
| opinion, cosplaying as though their AI is so intelligent
| that it's dangerous has become a marketing campaign for
| Anthropic, and their rhetoric around this topic should
| usually be taken with a grain of salt.)
| skerit wrote:
| They don't even want people using OpenCode with their Max
| subscriptions (which OpenAI does allow, kind of)
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Anthropic settled with authors of stolen work for $1.5b, this
| case is closed, isn't it?
| riku_iki wrote:
| Its not approved yet I think.
| drawfloat wrote:
| They work with the US military.
| mhb wrote:
| Defending the US. So?
| cess11 wrote:
| That's pretty bad.
| mhb wrote:
| Sweden too. So there's that.
| drawfloat wrote:
| What year do you think it is? The US is actively aggressive
| in multiple areas of the world. As a non US citizen I don't
| think helping that effort at the expense of the rest of the
| world is good.
| mhb wrote:
| Two things can be true. The US pays for most of the
| defense of NATO.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| The US military is famous for purely acting in self
| defence...
| throwaw12 wrote:
| 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.
| derac wrote:
| I agree, they seem to be following the Apple playbook. Make a
| closed off platform and present yourself as morally superior.
| esbranson wrote:
| > 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.
| mym1990 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| exactly. you cant compete morally when cheating, doing
| illegal things and supporting bad guys are norm. Hence, I
| hope open models will win in the long term.
|
| Similar to Oracle vs Postgres, or some closed source
| obscure caching vs Redis. One day I hope we will have very
| good SOTA open models where closed models compete to catch
| up (not saying Oracle is playing a catch up with Pg).
| Zambyte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| tizzzzz wrote:
| That's true. CI in all of my conversations with AIThat's true. In
| all my conversations with AI, I think CIaude's thinking is the
| richest.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| So apparently they're going to run a Super Bowl ad about ChatGPT
| having ads (without saying ChatGPT of course)........ Has doing
| an ad that focuses only on something about your competitor ever
| been the best play? Talk about yourself.
|
| Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns,
| like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to
| slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that
| narrative?
|
| Ads playlist
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Wasn't Apple's iconic 1984 ad basically that?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| ah, good one. Was it Big Blue or Big Brother in general being
| referenced in that one? Either way I suppose Apple didn't
| even say much of anything about their product in that one
| where Anthropic is at least highlighting a feature.
| gowld wrote:
| Apple's ad had a woman dressed like a Hooter's waitress to
| represent themselves. That makes themselves the focus of
| attention.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErwS24cBZPc
| simianwords wrote:
| I always found Anthropic to be trying hard to signal as one of
| the "good guys".
|
| I wonder how they can get away without showing Ads when ChatGPT
| has to be doing it. Will the enterprise business be that
| profitable that Ads are not required?
|
| Maybe OpenAI is going for something different - democratising
| access to vast majority of the people. Remember that ChatGPT is
| what people know about and what people use the free version of.
| Who's to say that making Ads by doing this but also prodiding
| more access is the wrong choice?
|
| Also, Claude holds nothing against ChatGPT in search. From my
| previous experiences, ChatGPT is just way better at deep searches
| through the internet than Claude.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Clause isn't trying to compete with OpenAI in the general
| consumer chat bot space.
| alt227 wrote:
| None of the ai companies are, they are all looking for those
| multi billion deals to provide the backplane for services
| like Copilot and Siri. Consumer chatbots are pure marketing,
| no company is going to make anything off those $20 per month
| subs to ai chatbots.
| Etheryte wrote:
| ChatGPT is providing a ridiculous amount of free service to
| gain/keep traction. Others also have free tiers, but to a much
| lesser extent. It's similar to Uber selling rides at a loss to
| win markets. It will get you traction, yes, but the bill has to
| be paid one day.
| timpera wrote:
| Even when you're subscribed, they're providing unreasonable
| amounts of compute for the price. I am subscribed to both
| Claude and ChatGPT, and Claude's limits are so tiny compared
| to ChatGPT's that it often feels like a rip-off.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| What other interaction models exist for Claude given that
| Anthropic seems to be stressing so much that this is for
| "conversations"?
|
| (Props for them for doing this, don't know how this is long-term
| sustainable for them though ... especially given they want to IPO
| and there will be huge revenue/margin pressures)
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| What makes Anthropic seem like early Apple is not just the unique
| taste, but the courage to stand firm with their vision of what
| the product should be.
| gowld wrote:
| Only 4 years old, they haven't existed long enough to be
| "firm".
| baal80spam wrote:
| Yeah. Does anyone remember how long did it take GOOG to
| remove "Don't be evil" from their motto?
| mcherm wrote:
| Making formal, public statements like this is a good start.
| It is certainly better than NOT making these sorts of
| statements.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| That courage was nowhere to be found when Palantir rolled up
| with a truckload of cash.
| rendang wrote:
| What's the problem with Palantir?
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > Anthropic seem like early Apple
|
| sorry but this is silly, nothing suggests this at all.
| mizuki_akiyama wrote:
| It's better to not fall for serif fonts and warm colors.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Apple had a vision, all right. It was our fault that we thought
| they would become the rebel with the hammer, and not the guy on
| the screen.
| politelemon wrote:
| This will be an amusing post to revisit in the internet archives
| when or if they do introduce ads in the future but dressed up in
| a different presentation and naming. Ultimately the investors
| will come calling.
| disease wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. They are using the Google playbook of
| "don't be evil" until it becomes extremely profitable to be
| evil.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Won't all the ad revenue come from commerce use cases ... and
| they seem to be excluding that from this announcement:
|
| > _AI will increasingly interact with commerce, and we look
| forward to supporting this in ways that help our users. We're
| particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce_
| observationist wrote:
| Why bother with ads when you can just pay an AI platform to
| prefer products directly? Then every time an agentic decision
| occurs, the product preference is baked in, no human in the
| loop. AdTech will be supplanted by BriberyTech.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| if llm ads become a real thing, let's acknowledge that this
| is exactly what will happen in no uncertain terms.
| observationist wrote:
| The only chance of that happening is if Altman somehow
| feels sufficiently shamed into abandoning the lazy
| enshittification track to monetization.
|
| I don't think they have an accurate model for what
| they're doing - they're treating it like just another app
| or platform, using tools and methods designed around
| social media and app store analytics. They're not
| treating it like what it is, which is a completely novel
| technology with more potential than the industrial
| revolution for completely reshaping how humans interact
| with each other and the universe, fundamentally
| disrupting cognitive labor and access to information.
|
| The total mismatch between what they're doing with it to
| monetize and what the thing actually means to
| civilization is the biggest signal yet that Altman might
| not be the right guy to run things. He's savvy and crafty
| and extraordinarily good at the palace intrigue and
| corporate maneuvering, but if AdTech is where they
| landed, it doesn't seem like he's got the right mental
| map for AI, for all he talks a good game.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a number of different llms - no reason they all
| need to do things the same. If you are replacing web
| search then ads are probably how you earn money. However
| if you are replacing the work people do for a company it
| makes more sense to charge for the work. I'm not sure if
| their current token charges are the right one, but it
| seems like a better track.
| strange_quark wrote:
| History is littered with challenger companies chest thumping
| that they're never going to do the bad thing, then doing the
| bad thing like a year later.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| "Don't be evil."
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| > The goals of the advertising business model do not always
| correspond to providing quality search to users.
|
| - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-
| Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998
| mirekrusin wrote:
| "OpenAI"
| yolostar1 wrote:
| History shows that software companies with large chunk of their
| platform being Free to Use mainly survive thanks to Ads.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| It goes well beyond free to use models unfortunately.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| You really think the giant ad company would put ads into their
| product after saying they won't? You should strive to be less
| cynical.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I believe Perplexity is doing this already, but specifically
| for looking up products, which is how I use AI sometimes. I am
| wondering how long before eBay, Amazon etc partner with AI
| companies to give them more direct API access so they can show
| suggested products and what not. I like how AI can summarize
| things for me when looking up products, then I open up the page
| and confirm for myself.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| yeah it's either that or openai has effected a massive own-
| goal... im leaning toward your view, but hoping that prediction
| does not manifest. i would be fine with all sorts of shit in
| life being more expensive but ad-free... but this is certainly
| a priviledged take and i recognize that.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| They are using this to virtue signal - but in reality it's just
| not compatible with their businesses model.
|
| Anthropic is mainly focusing on B2B/Enterprise and tool use
| cases, in terms of active users I'd guess Claude is distant
| last, but in terms of enterprise/paying customers I wouldn't be
| surprised if they were ahead of the others.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| See Github, which doesn't have display advertising.
| JoshPurtell wrote:
| Important to note Anthropic has next to no consumer usage
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Wrong (in trumps voice)
| JoshPurtell wrote:
| From Sama "More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people
| use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem
| than they do"
|
| Facts don't care about your feelings
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Sama lies all the time.
| sdrinf wrote:
| Besides the editorial control -which openai openly flagged to
| want to remain unbiased- there is a deeper issue with ads-based
| revenue models in AI: that of margins. If you want ads to cover
| compute & make margins -looking at roughly $50 ARPU at mature
| FB/GOOG level- you have two levers: sell more advertisement, or
| offer dumber models.
|
| This is exactly what chatgpt 5 was about. By tweaking both the
| model selector (thinking/non-thinking), and using a significantly
| sparser thinking model (capping max spend per conversation turn),
| they massively controlled costs, but did so at the expense of
| intelligence, responsiveness, curiosity, skills, and all the
| things I've valued in O3. This was the point I dumped openai, and
| went with claude.
|
| This business model issue is a subtle one, but a key reason why
| advertisement revenue model is not compatible (or competitive!)
| with "getting the best mental tools" -margin-maximization selects
| against businesses optimizing for intelligence.
| serjester wrote:
| The vast majority of people don't need smarter models and
| aren't willing to pay for a subscription. There's an argument
| to be made that ads on free users will subsidize the power
| users that demand frontier intelligence - done well this could
| increase OpenAI's revenue by an order of magnitude.
|
| This is going to be tough to compete against - Anthropic would
| need to go stratospheric with their (low margin) enterprise
| revenue.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I appreciate taking a stance, even if nobody is asking. It would
| be great if it was less of a bad faith effort.
|
| It's great that Anthropic is targeting the businesses of the
| world. It's a little insincere to than declare "no ads", as if
| that decision would obviously be the same if the bulk of their
| (not paying) users.
|
| There are, as far as ads go, perfectly fine opportunities to do
| them in a limited way for limited things within chatbots. I don't
| know who they think they are helping by highlighting how to do it
| poorly.
| erelong wrote:
| Don't understand why more companies don't just make ads opt-in as
| a trade for more features
|
| A lot of people are ok with ad supported free tiers
|
| (Also is it possible to do ads in a privacy respecting way or do
| people just object to ads across the board?)
| derektank wrote:
| I would object to ads across the board in this case (though I'm
| generally fine with even targeted ads). It would create a
| customer-client relationship between companies paying to
| advertise and the AI company, creating an incentive for
| Anthropic to manipulate the Claude service on their behalf. As
| an end user that seeks input from Claude on purchasing
| decisions, I do not want there to be any question as to whether
| or not it was subtly manipulated.
| waldopat wrote:
| I feel like they are picking a lane. ChatGPT is great for
| chatbots and the like, but, as was discussed in a prior thread,
| chatbots aren't the end-all-be-all of AI or LLMs. Claude Code is
| the workhorse for me and most folks I know for AI assisted
| development and business automation type tasks. Meanwhile, most
| folks I know who use ChatGPT are really replacing Google Search.
| This is where folks are trying to create llm.txt files to become
| more discoverable by ChatGPT specifically.
|
| You can see the very different response by OpenAI:
| https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp....
| ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers
| "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.
|
| For Anthropic to be proactive in saying they will not pursue ad
| based revenue I think is not just "one of the good guys" but that
| they may be stabilizing on a business model of both seat and
| usage based subscriptions.
|
| Either way, both companies are hemorrhaging money.
| johnsimer wrote:
| Both companies are making bank on inference
| ehsanu1 wrote:
| Could you substantiate that? That take into account training
| and staffing costs?
| ihsw wrote:
| The parent specifically said inference, which does not
| include training and staffing costs.
| lysace wrote:
| That is the big question. Got reliable data on that?
|
| (My gut feeling tells me Claude Code is currently underpriced
| with regards to inference costs. But that's just a gut
| feeling...)
| simianwords wrote:
| > If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to
| calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it
| seems to be about 50% -- lower than the norm for software
| companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than
| many industries.
|
| https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/can-ai-companies-become-
| pr...
| lysace wrote:
| The context of that quote is OpenAI as a whole.
| tvink wrote:
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/
|
| Their AWS spend being higher than their revenue might hint
| at the same.
|
| Nobody has reliable data, I think it's fair to assume that
| even Anthropic is doing voodoo math to sleep at night.
| waldopat wrote:
| You may not like this sources, but both the tomato throwers
| to the green visor crowds agree they are losing money. How
| and when they make up the difference is up to speculation
|
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-
| on... https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/29/openai-
| faces-a... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-own-
| forecast-predicts...
| exitb wrote:
| Maybe on the API, but I highly doubt that the coding agent
| subscription plans are profitable at the moment.
| tvink wrote:
| For sure not
| guidoism wrote:
| > ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers
| "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.
|
| Yeah I remember when Google used to be like this. Then today I
| tried to go to 39dollarglasses.com and accidentally went to the
| top search result which was actually an ad for some _other_
| company. Arrrg.
| panarky wrote:
| Before Google, web search was a toxic stew of conflicts of
| interest. It was impossible to tell if search results were
| paid ads or the best possible results for your query.
|
| Google changed all that, and put a clear wall between organic
| results and ads. They consciously structured the company like
| a newspaper, to prevent the information side from being
| polluted and distorted by the money-making side.
|
| Here's a snip from their IPO letter [0]:
|
| _Google users trust our systems to help them with important
| decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search
| results are the best we know how to produce. They are
| unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them
| or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display
| advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we
| label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper,
| where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not
| influenced by the advertisers' payments. We believe it is
| important for everyone to have access to the best information
| and research, not only to the information people pay for you
| to see._
|
| Anthropic's statement reads the same way, and it's refreshing
| to see them prioritize long-term values like trust over
| short-term monetization.
|
| It's hard to put a dollar value on trust, but even when they
| fall short of their ideals, it's still a big differentiator
| from competitors like Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI.
|
| I'd bet that a large portion of Google's enterprise value
| today can be traced to that trust differential with their
| competitors, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar
| outcome for Anthropic.
|
| Don't be evil, but unironically.
|
| [0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-
| letter/default...
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I agree. Having watched Google shift from its younger
| idealistic values to its current corrupted state, I can't
| help but be cynical about Anthropic's long-term trajectory.
|
| But if nothing else, I can appreciate Anthropic's current
| values, and hope they will last as long as possible...
| Gud wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| I end up using ChatGPT for general coding tasks because of the
| limited session/weekly limit Claude pro offers, and it works
| surprisingly well.
|
| The best is IMO to use them both. They complement each other.
| stavros wrote:
| I use OpenCode and I made an "architect" agent that uses Opus
| to make a plan, then gives that plan to a "developer" agent
| (with Sonnet) that implements it, and a "reviewer" agent
| (Codex) reviews it in the end. I've gotten much better
| results with this than with straight up Opus throughout, and
| obviously hit the limits much less often as well.
| catigula wrote:
| Does the veneer of goodness despite (alleged) cutthroat business
| practices from Anthropic bother anyone else?
| smusamashah wrote:
| Claude have posted on number of very sarcastic videos on twitter
| that take a jibe at ads
| https://x.com/claudeai/status/2019071118036942999 with an ending
| line "Ads are coming to IA. But not to Claude."
| big_toast wrote:
| I asked for this last week in an hn comment and people were
| pretty negative about it in the replies.
|
| But I'm happy with position and will cancel my ChatGPT and push
| my family towards Claude for most things. This taste effect is
| what I think pushes apple devices into households. Power users
| making endorsements.
|
| And I think that excess margin is enough to get past lowered ad
| revenue opportunity.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| They are not trying to sell adds. They are trying to sell
| themselves as a monthly service. That is what I think when they
| are trying to convince me to go there to think. I rather go think
| at Wikipedia.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| It's so hard to succeed without selling ads. There's an
| exponential growth aspect to these endeavors and ads add a lot
| of revenue, which investors like, so those who don't can find
| that the lost revenue "multiplies" due to lower outside
| investment, lower stock price growth, etc.
|
| I wish the financial aspects were different, because Anthropic
| is absolutely correct about ads being antithetical to a good
| user experience.
| crthpl wrote:
| Anthropic is very big (the biggest AI co?) in B2B, where you
| don't have ads. Also, if they end up creating a datacenter
| full of geniuses, ads won't make sense either.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| B2B will be hard to compete with vs Google and MSFT, as
| they can bundle services with Office365 or Google
| Workspace.
| conductr wrote:
| Idk, brainstorming and ideating is my main use case for AI
|
| I use it as codegen too but I easily have 20x more
| brainstorming conversations than code projects
|
| Most non-tech people I talk to are finding value with it with
| traditional things. The main one I've seen flourish is travel
| planning. Like, booking became super easy but full itinerary
| planning for a trip (hotels, restaurants, day trips/activities,
| etc) has been largely a manual thing that I see a lot of non-
| tech people using llms for. It's very good for open ended plans
| too, which the travel sites have been horrible at. For
| instance, "I want to plan a trip to somewhere warm and beachy I
| don't care about the dates or exactly where" maybe I care about
| the budget up front but most things I'm flexible on - those
| kinds of things work well as a conversation.
| derektank wrote:
| Wikipedia is, of course very useful, but what it's not good at
| is surfacing information I am unfamiliar with. Part of this
| problem is that Wikipedia editors are more similar to me, and
| more interested in similar things to me, than the average
| person writing text that appears online. Part of the problem is
| that the design of Wikipedia does not make it easy to stumble
| upon unexpected information; most links are to adjacent topics
| given they have to be relevant to the current article. But
| regardless, I'm much more likely to come across a novel concept
| when chatting with Claude, compared to browsing Wikipedia.
| seydor wrote:
| They made an ad to say that they won't have ads, i dont know if
| they are aware of the irony.
|
| https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2019074628191142065
|
| In any case, they draw undue attention to openAI rather than
| themselves. Not good advertising
|
| Both openAI and Anthropic should start selling compute devices
| instead. There is nothing stoping open-source LLMs from eating
| their lunch mid-term
| bananaflag wrote:
| Ads as a concept are not evil. There have been ads since
| prehistory.
|
| Littering a potentially quality product with ads which one
| cannot easily separate is what the evil is.
| apt-apt-apt-apt wrote:
| Why is it ironic?
|
| It would seem to be ironic if they put ads in their models to
| say they won't put ads.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Sure, ad free forever, until it is not.
|
| Great by Anthropic, but I put basically no long term trust in
| statements like this.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Claude focuses on enterprise and B2B rather than mass consumer,
| so it makes sense for them.
| titzer wrote:
| > There are many good places for advertising. A conversation with
| Claude is not one of them.
|
| > ...but including ads in conversations with Claude would be
| incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful
| assistant for work and for deep thinking.
|
| Sadly, with my disillusionment with the tech industry, plus the
| trend of the past 20 years, this smacks of Larry Page's early
| statements about how bad advertising could distort search results
| and Google would never do that. Unsurprisingly, I am not able to
| find the exact quote with Google.
| Trufa wrote:
| Yeah, it's a shame we've all grown so jarred, I do see this
| better than nothing.
|
| In this animal farm Orwellian cycle we've been going through,
| at least they start here, unlike others.
|
| I for one commend this, but stay vigilant.
| dbgrman wrote:
| 100%. Love this approach by Anthropic. The Meta "monetization
| league" is assembling at OpenAI and doing what they've done best
| at Meta.
|
| However, I do think we need to take Anthropic's word with a grain
| of salt, too. To say they're fully working in the user's interest
| has yet to be proven. This trust would require a lot of effort to
| be earned. Once the companies intends to or becomes public,
| incentives change, investors expect money and throwing your users
| under the bus is a tried and tested way of increasing shareholder
| value.
| ptx wrote:
| So they have "made a choice" to keep Claude ad-free, they say.
| "Today [...] Claude's only incentive is to give a helpful
| answer", they say. But there's nothing that suggests that they
| can't make a different choice tomorrow, or whenever it suits
| them. It's not profitable to betray your trust too early.
| jhickok wrote:
| I can't really imagine any statement they could give that would
| ease concerns that at some point in time they change their
| mind. But for now, it is a relief to read, even if this is a
| bit of marketing. The longer it goes without being enshittified
| the better.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >An advertising-based business model would introduce incentives
| that could work against this principle.
|
| I agree with this - I'm not so much worried that ChatGPT is going
| to silently insert advertising copy into model answers. I'm
| worried that advertising alongside answers creates bad incentives
| that then drive future model development. We saw Google Search go
| down this path.
| nasorenga wrote:
| It's nice that they don't show ads in conversations with Claude -
| but I wonder if they collect profiling information from my
| prompts and activities to sell to advertising firms.
| falloutx wrote:
| Claude is the last place where thinking happens.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| That's positive. How is Claude? Is it censorship heavy?
| derektank wrote:
| If you broach subjects Anthropic considers sensitive (cyber
| security, dangerous biotech, etc) Claude is very likely to shut
| you down completely and refuse to answer. As someone that works
| in cybersecurity and uses Claude daily, it is annoying to ask a
| question regarding some feature of Cobalt Strike and have it
| refuse to answer, even though the tool's documentation is
| public. I would have cancelled my ChatGPT subscription at this
| point if once or twice a month I didn't need to ask it to look
| up something when Claude refuses.
| golem14 wrote:
| How are the Chinese models in this regard? Qwen3 for
| instance?
| tolerance wrote:
| Anthropic probably saw how much money they made off of the
| Moltbot hype and figured that they don't need ad revenue. They
| can go a step further and build a marketplace for similar setups,
| paying the developers who make them in micro transactions per
| tokens.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| RemindMe! 2 years
| s3p wrote:
| Good on Anthropic! I appreciate how deliberate they are on
| maintaining user trust. Have preferred Claude's responses more
| through the API, so I don't imagine this would have affected me
| as much but it is still nice to see.
| sdellis wrote:
| The key hurdle for AI to leap is establishing trust with users.
| No one trusts the big players (for good reason) and it is causing
| serious anxiety among the investors. It seems Claude acknowledges
| this and is looking to make trust a critical part of their
| marketing messaging by saying no ads or product placement. The
| problem is that serving ads is only one facet of trust. There are
| trust issues around privacy, intellectual property, transparency,
| training data, security, accuracy, and simply "being evil" that
| Claude's marketing doesn't acknowledge or address. Trust, on the
| scale they need, is going to be very hard for any of them to
| establish, if not impossible.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Impossible. The only way to know what is happening is to have
| the code run on your own infra.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| What do you mean? Google is roughly the most trusted
| organization in the world by revealed preference. The 800(?)
| million ChatGPT users - I have a hard time reading that as a
| trust problem.
| olivierestsage wrote:
| Usage metrics don't reveal preference in all cases. The fact
| these companies are sketchy/untrustworthy is practically a
| meme, including among non-tech people. Their services are
| widely relied upon, but they enjoy very little subjective
| good will
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I really want to applaud Anthropic; I remain cautiously
| optimistic, but I'm not certain how long they will maintain this
| posture. I will say that the recent announcement from OpenAI has
| put me off from ChatGPT -- I use Gemini occasionally, because
| it's the devil I know. OpenAI has gone back and forth on their
| positions so many times in a way that feels truly hostile to
| their users.
|
| Plus, I'm not a huge fan of Sam Altman.
| czk wrote:
| i spend most of my time with claude thinking about when my daily
| usage limit is going to reset
| hansmayer wrote:
| Since when does HN welcome blatant self-advertising posts like
| this one ?
| 4corners4sides wrote:
| This is one of those "don't be evil" like articles that companies
| remove when the going gets tough but I guess we should be
| thankful that things are looking rosy enough for Anthropic at the
| moment that they would release a blog like this.
|
| The point about filtering signal vs. noise in search engines
| can't really be stated enough. At this point using a search
| engine and the conventional internet in general is an exercise in
| frustration. It's simply a user hostile place - infinite cookie
| banners for sites that shouldn't collect data at all, auto play
| advertisements, engagement farming, sites generated by AI to
| shill and produce a word count. You could argue that AI
| exacerbates this situation but you also have to agree that it is
| much more pleasant to ask perplexity, ChatGPT or Claude a
| question than to put yourself through the torture of conventional
| search. Introducing ads into this would completely deprive the
| user of a way of navigating the web in a way that actually
| respects their dignity.
|
| I also agree in the sense that the current crop of AIs do feel
| like a space to think as opposed to a place where I am being
| manipulated, controlled or treated like some sheep in flock to be
| sheared for cash.
| pixelready wrote:
| The current crop of LLM-backed chatbots do have a bit of that
| "old, good internet" flavor. A mostly unspoiled frontier where
| things are changing rapidly, potential seems unbounded, the
| people molding the actual tech and discussing it are
| enthusiasts with a sort of sorcerer's apprentice vibe. Not sure
| how long it can persist, since I've seen this story before and
| we all understand the incentive structures at play. Does anyone
| know how if there are precedents for PBCs or B-Corp type
| businesses to be held accountable for betraying their stated
| values? Or is it just window dressing with no legal clout? Can
| they change to a standard corporation on a whim and ditch the
| non-shareholder maximization goals?
| terminalbraid wrote:
| > I guess we should be thankful that things are looking rosy
| enough for Anthropic
|
| Forgive me if I am not.
| jorvi wrote:
| Current LLMs often produce much, much worse results than
| manually searching.
|
| If you need to search the internet on a topic that is full of
| unknown unknowns for you, they're a pretty decent way to get a
| lay of the land, but beyond that, off to Kagi (or Google) you
| go.
|
| Even worse is that the results are inconsistent. I can ask
| Gemini five times at what temperature I should take a waterfowl
| out of the oven, and get five different answers, 10degC apart.
|
| You _cannot_ trust answers from an LLM.
| chrysoprace wrote:
| It obviously takes discipline, but using something like
| Perplexity as an aggregator typically gets me better results,
| because I can click through to the sources.
|
| It's not a perfect solution because you need the
| discipline/intuition to do that, and not blindly trust the
| summary.
| stavros wrote:
| > This is one of those "don't be evil" like articles that
| companies remove when the going gets tough but I guess we
| should be thankful that things are looking rosy enough for
| Anthropic at the moment that they would release a blog like
| this.
|
| Exactly this. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the
| outcome, but at least I'm glad we're getting a bit more time
| ad-free.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| Sometimes posts like this are just value-signaling. I hear a lot
| of cynicism and "just you wait, the other shoe will drop"
| comments along those lines.
|
| But combined with the other projects Anthropic has pursued (e.g.
| around understanding bias and explaining "how the model is
| thinking as it is") and decisions it has made, I'm happy with the
| course they're plotting. They seem consistently upstanding,
| thoughtful, and respectful. I want to commend them and earnestly
| say: Keep up the good work!
| tines wrote:
| Not the point of the article, but just responding to the
| headline: LLMs are a space to think in the same way that watching
| television is a space to think. Some people may think while
| watching TV, maybe many of the people reading this watch TV this
| way, but most will not. In fact, television mostly acts as a
| soporific, killing intelligent thought and numbing the mind
| against any sort of complex cognition. Same with LLMs. They're a
| space to sleepily watch someone else think.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I have such mixed feelings about Anthropic. Opus 4.5 is legit,
| Claude Code has been making solid progress (but it's gonna get
| stomped by pi) and they've been trying to be more transparent. On
| the other hand, they still infra issues, they till haven't open
| sourced Claude Code and they're going after other harnesses that
| use their sub. Dario also seems to have a very paternalistic
| attitude that I don't like, though I don't think that will
| survive the market.
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