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“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That famous quote by fictional character Harvey Dent in the movie The Dark Knight got stuck in my head when I read some of the stuff happening at Anthropic last week.
The company was built under the notion that it should do better than OpenAI in building safe AI technologies. And for a while, it did. Anthropic committed to pause developing new AI models unless it could guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance.
That era is over. Under its old policy, Anthropic had a hard rule: If a new model couldn’t be proven safe before release, it wouldn’t be released.
Its new policy is much more flexible. Anthropic will only pause development if two things are true at the same time: its leaders believe the company is ahead of competitors, and that the model poses a serious risk of catastrophe. If either condition isn’t met, development moves forward.
Image credit: rudall30 / Shutterstock
That allegation backfired, with many people describing the statement as hypocritical because Anthropic itself trained its models on content scraped from the internet, including pirated books.
As if that wasn’t enough evidence that Anthropic was moving closer to the dark side, it also updated its terms of service to ban the use of Claude subscriptions in third-party products through the OAuth protocol. This means Claude users cannot utilize their subscription in tools like OpenCode and OpenClaw, requiring them to pay for API charges separately. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan describes the move as “anti-competitive.”
The implications stretch well beyond Anthropic. When the company widely considered the conscience of the AI industry starts bending its own rules, it gives every other lab permission to do the same, or go even further.
However, Anthropic has, notably, pushed back in talks with the Pentagon on how its AI should be used, especially when it comes to fully autonomous military applications. That suggests the company is still trying to hold the line in some areas, even as pressure builds to move faster.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
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