I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
I’m thinking about banning Claude code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc.
Insisting on only reading CLAUDE.md sometimes leads to split brain problems when different team members use different tools. Just unnecessary.
Anthropic is again refusing to follow industry standards like AGENTS.md, and insists that CLAUDE.md needs to be special
now here's what's wrong with their stance:
1. the underlying attitude from Anthropic is that they know better than everyone else
OpenAI is doing it wrong. the open source community is doing it wrong. everyone is doing it wrong
only we anthropic know the best way, and we will not budge
2. the idea that every model needs a separate AGENTS.md is not even self-consistent
if that's the case, why do we have a CLAUDE.md?
it should be
- CLAUDE_FABLE_5.md
- CLAUDE_OPUS_5.md
- CLAUDE_OPUS_4_8.md
...
every repo should pay the tax to maintain dozens of different variations for every single model that's ever used by any contributor, and every one needs to be constantly, rigorously evaluated with millions of tokens
oh and every model becomes obsolete every several weeks, so just allocate a team in your company to refresh your markdown files full time and not do any real work
3. they did commit to providing customization, which is nice. but that's different from following standards
the right way to do this is to acknowledge the industry already has a standard, and default to reading AGENTS.md
provide a way to read CLAUDE.md as an escape hatch, not the other work around
i love many things from anthropic, especially fable. i just wish they start to see there's a culture problem here, and they are gradually losing mindshare because of it