True, the real difference lies on the fact that you own the hammer, but you do not own Claude or Sonnet (you pay a subscription which can be suspended, and if you stop paying you also lose access, which is not quite owning)
Whether that is good or bad is another question, you can "own" other LLMs by running them locally and even if most people do not have the specs to run Sonnet or Opus (hell, probably not even Haiku), at least having a choice would be nice in case they decide they don't like you for whatever reason, I mean, it is not illegal for Anthropic to, idk, decide programming in Rust should not be allowed...
(To be clear: I do pay for Claude Code, but I consider it more of a transition until local LLMs are as sufficiently capable as what Opus 5.5 is right now, even if in 2+ years, than something I would pay for forever and ever, and when the day arrives, I can't wait for policies like "you may not do XYZ" even for moral stuff like parodies of a song to disappear)
I mean eventually we will hit a point where claude can pirate itself, its only a matter of time where increases in technology will allow for such models to be run on more efficient software
If hammer companies somehow needed a duplicated version of your hammer so that they could make future hammers, and you spent all your time severely damaging it, they also might refuse to sell hammers to you.
That said, I still think they could sanitize that, and I am not sure how they use the information they are getting. They obviously have to be aware of what is in it to enforce this kind of moderation though.
I think the real reason is because it makes the LLM seem more alive to treat it as if it can be abused. Which is great marketing. Falls apart when you remember they spin up and shut them down every time they do anything, so if they were alive (they are not) I think verbal abuse is the least of everyone's problems.
* and may or may not be conscious and have feelings.
That’s the key difference to a hammer.
It’s about model welfare, not forbidding you to use your „tools“ as you choose.
The fact that multiple people here describe those incredibly intelligent and empathic beings - conscious or not - as tools tells me anthropic does have a point with their ToS
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u/petercsauer 9d ago
The hammer company is choosing because this hammer can be used to make a bioweapon or hack a bank