alt Hacker NewsThere are some commentors in this thread downplaying the severity of a service provider being less than transparent about exactly what their shipped tooling does on customer's machines.
That the provider's business needs necessitate the this behaviour doesn't justify their lack of honest disclosure. That honest disclosure would render the solution to their problem useless isn't my problem. If anything, that they thought this was acceptable makes me wonder what else they're harvesting from my machine? PII?
The cynic in me can't help but feel that the state of these comments reflects less on the commentor's views of this debacle but rather their feelings about AI/Anthropic/America/what-have-you.
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Whether or not you find Anthropic's behavior bad, theybhave been very loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models for a while now. This seems like an obvious response to me that would be a mechanism to make that obvious.
Dishonesty seems to be a core value at Anthropic. I find myself wondering how anyone could have confidence in them after their repeated breaches of trust.
I agree with you and disagree. Like these days expectations of software are through the floor. We expect them to be greedy assholes taking all data they can on the downlow. So why did this particular thing make a big splash? Two possibilities it's astroturfed by chinese labs or it speaks to our anxietes regarding AI. We worry that the AI doesn't serve our interests but rather the interests of the creator. That the advice we get may subtly flawed to sabotage us should we try to do the wrong thing. That the not even the creator is in control and the AI is just doing its own thing.
So any covert bullshittery hits hard.
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First its the "Chinese" then it will be people using "cyber" capabilities, or "jailbreaking" or "going against Dario" or any other thing they find "objectionable".