Anthropic Blocks Paying User for Anything Touching Training Larger Models
Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models
CS PhD student Jiahao Shao says Anthropic flagged him for "training a competitor" even though he never distilled Claude—his rollouts came from a strong open-source model, with Claude only helping submit jobs and run analysis. Now any prompt involving RFT, SFT, or training larger models gets him blocked, his Opus 5.5 downgraded to Opus 5, or his session killed outright. He calls the anti-distillation policy a double standard.
You train on the open web—books, code, forums, everyone else's work—then ban anyone from learning from your outputs at scale. Protecting a moat is one thing; moralizing it while standing on scraped knowledge is another.
- zmmmmm
It's very clear to me that however much you like Claude and Anthropic models, every professional user shoudl be actively cultivating a set of alternatives and fallbacks to use and seeking to ensure the overall ecosystem is as open, standardised and portable as possible.
Anthropic is highly opinionated, dogmatic and idealistic. They have made a pragmatic decision already to cut loose a whole swathe of users so they can pursue areas higher up the value chain. that was essentially the original decision they made when they went after software engineering instead of general users. The fact they are repeating this over and over by continuing to carve out sets of users and usages they don't want reinforces this as a persistent core principle rather than a single pragmatic business decision.
What this means is that at a higher level, their core principle is to sacrifice users they don't "need" rather than provide a broad, accessible service. Which means in turn, you have to accept that when your usage conflicts with their interests, you are at very high risk they will cut you out. If you already depend on Anthropic in any critical path of your daily life, this will be a significant issue.
- bushido
Something I've seen it do recently is refusing to extract services out of my own monolith code base because it finds copying code morally wrong.
But its refusal to work pattern is getting pretty obnoxious. Another one I ran into last week was it refused to start a developer session to do browser testing for a code base it was working on because signing in was suddenly against it's programming.
It listed all the conditions it needed for a sign in to be possible, agreed that my code base met all conditions, but refused to progress. I tried it in multiple fresh sessions with the same result.
- tristanj
This user is based in Hong Kong, where Claude is geo-blocked and not available. If you try visiting claude.ai from a Hong Kong IP address, you get an "unavailable in this region" message.
They are likely accessing Claude via a VPN. Doing model training work over a VPN is a highly suspicious signal, and likely triggers Anthropic's classifiers. It's not surprising that their account got flagged.
- fwlr
The fact that these corporations don’t spontaneously collapse from the sheer weight of irony is a continuing disappointment for me.
- clcaev
Perhaps a manifest index/list of training data and learning method should be mandatory for “public” use of any model, sort of like food ingredient package labeling. The list of texts used and any weighting seems important to facilitate a public understanding / debate of model expectations and behavior.
- byte_0
This week, I asked Claude Code to generate an MD to continue working on another computer, without losing the context, and it refused claming some sort of extraction. It was only until I selected Opus, that it completed the request.
- ktosobcy
> You built your models on the world's data
most important bit…: stealing world's data…
- tlonny
One must wonder about the strength of their “moat” if they feel this sort of thing is necessary.