John David Back

Engineering @ Indeed dot com. Cincinnati arts reviews.

[John David Back @johndavidback]

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.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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

[John David Back @johndavidback]

I've gone from stuffing 20% complete novels in the back of desk drawers to stuffing 20% complete vibe coded B2B SaaS apps in the back of desk drawers

[John David Back @johndavidback]

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

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@jeffjh14 Who is Grayson Allen

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@Bengals What about Trenton Irwin

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@jeffjh14 @willie_lutz I would like to say in my social circle I am one of the top Trenton Irwin fans

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@abigailbowman1 Like where

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@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

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@5chw4r7z Also a place for the city's downtrodden to take a late night piss relatively uninterrupted.

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@ItsAngryMom @RonFilipkowski This made me lol

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@jeffjh14 This actually seems better somehow

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@kevando_ Who is the hero of this tale

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@chrisostoich Do you kiss your mother, the acclaimed classical pianist, with that mouth? Smh

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@chrisostoich @bidalaNFT Chris send me one dude

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@chrisostoich Well how much gum did it originally cost

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@kevando_ And with your spirit

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@jeffjh14 What

[John David Back @johndavidback]

@abohw @AftabPureval @mercantilelib He was there too actually. Cranley.

[John David Back @johndavidback]

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??