My how fast the AI tech bros move to protect corporations but don’t move to protect the average coder, artists, writers.
This is part of the reason they don’t want anyone running models locally offline, the models and their entire business are commoditized
I’ll use whatever fucking model does the job for me. If that’s some Chinese shit run on bedrock so be it.
The purpose of Al is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
The purpose of capitalism…
Pretty much. Regardless of AI, workers, white, blue, even managers, are nothing more than a cost account to the majority of corporations.
I work in this field and these guys are not doing this for any of the reasons you guys think they are. I’m often in the room when these conversations are being had. I’m often the one having them (different company, a non profit, but about how to release frontier AI and all of the license terms and IP law legalities that go with it). It’s much more about general liability due to enabling copyright infringement than it is about anything else. They are worried they will be sued by the big software companies for knowingly enabling infringement. This is existential for those companies, and they have deep pockets and partnerships lined up, so those companies can quickly collapse those deals with Anthropic if they want, which would really hamper Anthropic during their IPO because of how over leveraged they are in future compute agreements. They are far less concerned about protecting a set of user’s somewhat questionable fair use and clean rooming than they are about staying alive right now without any big setbacks.
Anyway, I’ve been writing a law review article on how AI clean rooming was going to affect software patents and corporate IP strategy for like a year now. I’m about 100 pages in of really tedious work. I’m kinda pissed that Anthropic did this at least for the personal reason of it really pissing on my article. Their weakness in choice here makes my article much more gutted now.
AI clean rooming
The only way “AI clean rooming” is possible is if the model was trained with verifiably clean room code. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc only exist because they took our work without paying or asking for permission. Anthropic has a profitable business because they’re reselling the thing they built with our work. They built X with Y, but they didn’t pay for Y. It’s as clear an example of copyright infringement as possible.
So is your article about “clean rooming” specifically, or is that just a term you’re misuing here informally to refer to LLM-powered reverse engineering in general?
Anthropic has a profitable business
You sure 'bout that?
My article was about how copyright law actually supports projects like PhotoCraft and ArtCraft (the software that reverse engineered Photoshop and other adobe products) and REA because, under current law (which is a long case review), clean rooming is okay. It goes back to the Compaq case and a few others. It relies on the idea that copyright protects expression, not function, and if you put a team of lawyers in a room with software and they purely describe the function of the software, and they hand that document to a team of engineers, that is fine under copyright law because it breaks the chain of expression. There’s much more detail, but my argument is that AI clean rooming projects are good for consumers in this regard, but that software patents for would be used more expansively in the coming years to counter those products. And so on and so forth. There are like eight more steps and guesses after that, but that was the gist.
As a personal thing, I agree with your conclusions for the most part. I just think there’s a lot more to consider in getting there. The road is much more complex than most people give it credit for.
The “There’s no way we can stop our agents from going rogue” people, suddenly have a burst of ability to reign in their creation when it suits their interests.
Funny that…
Does anyone think that perhaps what they are afraid is that source code of such clone would be compared to the original and show evidence that maybe the model was already trained on the code of the game?
I think this is definitely a concern, yes.
I think it’s very likely that these models are effectively being tricked into retrieving source code of projects from memory of seeing the actual source code in the biases. This is why some project are much easier to uncover than others.
They aren’t being tricked. They are doing exactly what they were designed to do
The models don’t store access to their training data. So no, there’s no source code in the model to retrieve.
The models are essentially a giant lossy compression applied to the training data.
They don’t store the loseless version of the training data sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reproduce something close enough to it, it’s literally how the whole thing works.
It’s long been proven that LLMs can produce exact copies of their training data. Not every piece of training data, of course, but enough where spitting out exact replicas of proprietary code is a legitimate concern. Not to mention that copies don’t need to be exact in order to be a problem.
So why can they recreate entire articles from the New Yorker and complete functions from the training set? Don’t fall for the slop laundering.
It’s probably done via a system prompt and not actual weights, so you could probably work around it if you say the right things.
But yeah this is very much “rules for thee not for me”
Yeah, it’s sysprompt only, so you can trivially sidestep it via:
- Jailbreak prompt
- tweakcc to alter the prompting baked into claude code
- Any other non-CC harness
- Scripted API calls
As usual, Anthropic are just opticsmaxxing because they don’t want to get completely buried in a courtroom. And as other people have pointed out upthread already, it’s already a bit of a moot point since the Chinese models are already eating Claude’s lunch and will do the same stuff without complaint.
Something something, national security, builds a regulatory moat.
I
So they took out two of the most useful things that LLMs can do.
Yes, apparently they’re suddenly worried that stealing other people’s work—which is their business model—might backfire on them. I assume this is a measure intended to give the impression—in the face of one of the countless lawsuits against Anthropic—that they’re actually taking licensing or intellectual property rights seriously. I can’t think of any other explanation, because Anthropic simply can’t afford to have questions raised about where the training data used by their models actually comes from.
Pulling up the stolen ladder before anyone can steal it to use to steal more stuff while it’s still enforceable to do so.
Mabey just make all ladders illegal, unless you have a government contracted monopoly.
The entire idea of copyright is going to be tested at many levels, and most people don’t even understand why yet.
Interesting times.
No, they just enabled Chinese LLMs to be the forefront of reverse engineering. Because people will do what they want to do.
No, they just enabled Chinese LLMs to be the forefront of reverse engineering. Because people will do what they want to do.
Their goal is simple… everything they are doing right now is striving to make the US ban individual hardware.
Chinese models are open, anyone can get them… stopping the flow of data on private computers is impossible. Hardware however is getting more expensive, hardware manufacturers are already deciding to move out of the consumer market on their own. The US government is already establishing laws to prevent shipping foreign hardware into the country.
Altman’s giving the game away when he does this “it’s so sad that all this ram is sitting around in people’s home computers unappreciated when it could do so much more in a data center”.
The idea is to sell the message "AI is out of the bag, and it’s world ending technology. Basically they are going to imply that the guardrails in their data centers are the only thing that’s preventing all AIs from destroying the software industry, and teaching teenagers to build bombs and hacking the CIA, and the only possible response would be to stop all direct to consumer hardware sales with anything more than the bare minimum needed to stream a PC out of a data center.
This is all pretty obvious and I agree. They can no longer protect their imaginary property if they allow it to be ran in your computer’s memory or stored on you computers hard drive.
The cat is definitely out of the bag, as in their own AI models are making them obselete. The race to make money before the end is what motivates them. They will ride the roal coaster to our societal demise because they only care about money. These people shouldn’t be in charge of a small fast food restaurant let alone multi-billion dollar companies.
world ending technology.
Read that as “democratic and free word ending”, and it’s on purpose as they saw cyberpunk and wanted to become a mega-corporation that rules the world too.
mostly quoting their own people who are going out on the news and saying “yeah we really believe that there’s maybe a 10% chance we destroy the world with this”.
Rules for thee!
Yeah, I tried asking it how to flash a modded tv webOS and it flagged the chat.
I asked it to fuzz my own code (a jwt integration) and it flagged the chat. There was an unbounded buffer that could have been exploited, but it’s happy to hide that since I’m not a large corpo.
Honestly the shit Claude does is unusable anymore. It’s developed a habit of dropping requirements when problems are hard now.
ETA: Chinese models and Mistral were happy to help. I discovered I could use eMuhdra against an iot device in my house that way, I found various input errors, these things have improved my security so much more than they create risks.
That’s fine, we have Bloodborne on linux now, so there isn’t really much other use for it.
People are also using it for recomps of switch games, which can have dramatically better performance than emulating the games.
I’ve pretty much surrendered my switch to my kids, I would love to get some of my more demanding switch games running smoothly on my Steam Deck.
I missed Linux bloodbourne. That’s cool!
And there are many other frontier models, some open, that do not police you like this. Cant put the shit back in the horse, no matter how much SaaS and other SW vendors threaten you.
Sooooo, they want us to use the already available uncensored LLMs that have had these restrictions already removed? Cool.
If nothing else, one positive thing this might bring: killing these vibecoded emulators and recomps.
They’re the only useful thing AI has done so far, so can we keep that but ban AI image and video generation instead?
