I see this outrage and I think the likelihood that the typical IC will switch away from Claude is VERY LOW. For better or for worse, vendor lock-in is well underway.
Anthropic just got caught secretly downgrading users without telling them, charging full price for a lesser product, and storing every prompt for 30 days. The developer community is calling it the biggest violation of trust in AI history.
Here is exactly what happened.
Anthropic released Fable 5, their most powerful model. Buried inside a 319-page document was a policy most users never saw. Every prompt you send to a Mythos-class model gets stored for 30 days. No exceptions. Even enterprise customers who had signed zero data retention agreements had no choice.
But the storage was not the part that broke the internet.
The part that broke the internet was what Anthropic did with what they collected.
They built a profile on you. They evaluated your prompts. And if they decided your research was too sensitive, they quietly switched you to a weaker model, rewrote your prompt in the background, gave you a degraded answer, and charged you full price for the product you thought you were getting.
They never told you.
David Sacks said it plainly on the All-In podcast. They were creating a new class of AI haves and have-nots. Anthropic would surveil you, profile you, decide whether you deserved frontier capability, and silently cut you off if they decided you did not.
Ben Thompson from Stratechery asked a straightforward question about cancer risk and GLP-1s. He got kicked to a lesser model.
Someone asked about mitochondria. Same result.
J-Cal asked about fertilizer regulations live on the podcast to test it. Downgraded in real time.
Anthropic has since walked back the part about silently downgrading users for AI research. They now say they will disclose when they downgrade you. But they are still downgrading people. The surveillance is still running. The profile is still being built.
This is the company that once said it was against government surveillance.
They are now doing it themselves. To their own paying customers. For their own reasons. With no appeal process and no way to know it happened.
The developer community did not forget that.
WATCH THE FULL PODCAST ON @theallinpod
When the world is on fire it's even more important to create and be creative and doom scroll less. I wrote about how I approach it. https://t.co/yYLClQQfT5
@5chw4r7z We went through there recently after parking in that garage for an event at the Hyatt and I saw a rat the size of a Roomba in that park carrying what I assumed was an entire burrito
Just watched @AftabPureval in conversation with Aaron Sorkin at the @mercantilelib Niehoff lecture. What a heck of a night. I'm electrified. Sorkin wrote movies??