It seems deeply suspicious that a company benefitting from regulatory capture would artificially stoke fears of AI and propaganda about it.

Suspicious in that it's unlikely or suspicious in that it betrays their real motivation?

On the former: It kind of makes sense if they think they can convince regulators that they (and maybe a few select competitors) are the only ones who can keep AI in check. Regulation can work in their favor given how well they're established, financially, compared to the small upstarts they need to keep down.

On the latter: I agree, see above. Promoting the idea that AI can or will kill us all, but also that it can't be stopped except by them, puts them in a position (if they're successful in their persuasion) to get more financial benefits.

When you search "us passport" or "tsa precheck" on Google, you constantly see promoted ad results impersonating government sites (ie passportvisarush.com or easegov.com) extracting and selling your PII (social security number, etc) from your application.

I've reported the ads multiple times, but new ones still end up being promoted. I'm sure these companies have mined and sold thousands of SSN/address/DOB info from unsuspecting users.

I hope you realize that there are legitimate third-party services which assist with passport applications and filing paperwork, generally in the capacity as a courier. Similarly, in my state and others, there are third-party services which operate as storefronts in under-served communities, that provide services as the DMV office would.

So it is unclear how you determine that they are definitely scams, unless you have attempted to trace each one through referrals or official links from the government office they are representing. Some don't have any link, though: the passport assistance services may be operating independently as middlemen. Is it worth paying someone to assist you with paperwork? Do you only speak Laotian?

In general, for any government service, there are usually middlemen who'll assist you in filling out paperwork and getting approved. That includes Medicaid and the IRS and Social Security. Of course, some of those assistors have licenses, or represent a facility. The passport agencies may not need any bona fides like that.

On the other hand, if a service is advertising "TSA PreCheck" services (and not simply intercepting your keywords to advertise unrelated stuff) then there are only three authorized partners: IDEMIA, CLEAR, or Telos. But I bet you that your keywords are simply triggering some adspam.

The underlying government services are hard to access _because_ middlemen stand to profit from providing assistance.

Do you really think that middle man services have enough leverage to convince the government to degrade their services? That is hard to believe. Its more likely that the government process just sucks and these services sprung up to fill a need. At some point it will be improved and these services will disappear.

Not necessarily, but they do prevent government services from being improved by hiding the inefficiencies.

People with influence to fix bureaucracy don’t suffer through it because they can afford the middlemen.

These are not illegitimate. They are registered 3rd parties facilitating the government. At least the ones that are on the list are not.

I got one from passportsfast or something. Highly recommended (if it's registered)

> https://travel.state.gov/en/passports/apply/get-fast/courier...

it's mostly a travesty that only the rigth mix of political apathy and corruption can get you.

also, searches for dmv related content

Doesnt help, when official government websites ( usps.com ) are on the commercial suffix, and not .gov

Yeah, USPS is a weird one.

We need a .QUANGO domain for stuff like that :p

It’s a trustworthy name for enterprises. Many executives are old enough that IBM was the Google of their time when they started their careers.

Interesting timing to release this on the same day Jensen makes a statement on open source AI.

It does make me wonder if these firms, some or all, are saving some announcements to coincide with others that hit venues like HN. Companies like Nvidia surely aren't waiting, but OpenAI and Anthropic have unusual timing.

There are trillions of dollars at play, so probably

Google and Amazon both have incredibly large compute deals with frontier labs and GovCloud. They may not want to sour on that cash.

That ship has sailed, I would wager all the AI labs are ingesting anything human generated, whether that means Hollywood movies, Taylor Swift’s discography, YouTube videos or private GitHub source repos.

The reward for having a competitive edge is exponentially higher than the risk of a lawsuit. Politicians are still old bureaucrats who don’t understand technology.

Is there any SCOTUS precedent for this? It seems like a huge 1A issue for the government to limit self hosted access to a foreign country’s LLM.

After what happened to TikTok, I don't think it's a stretch.

TikTok wasn’t open source and able to be run on your own hardware. Banning Alibaba’s models (or even a personal fork of them) running on your machines seems hard to defend in court.

Stripe seems to be doing fairly well as a private company. They continually offer liquidity events for employees to cash out, while also retaining less pressure for hypergrowth from outside activists and investors.

It sounds like Anthropic is dangerously low on compute availability if they’re prioritizing these refusals as their OKRs.

I think it's obvious that they are critically lacking in compute capacity especially since OpenAI has committed billions to locking up all the future compute production.

And I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Anthropic to introduce QoS or throttling on users of their models. It's pretty much a necessity when offering public access to a scarce resource and it's been a common practice for decades.

What is the alternative? We just accept that it doesn't work half the time because the system is overloaded with molt bots?

I agree. If compute is the issue and pricing can't budge then something has to give.

They would have kept my business if they were honest and upfront. Instead they sold me something that worked well, broke it without warning, remained silent about it until enough people caught on, chose to do nothing, then proceeded to release a model that eats ~30% more tokens with no advantage over prior models.

If they chose to unbrick their model and offered what we had a couple months ago at a 50% hike, I would have been onboard. I've seen enough now of how this company treats its customers to continue using or recommending them.

Also, Codex works much better than CC now for anyone who happens to be on the fence.

Codex actually feels severely lacking to me, trying to switch off Claude Code. I'm trying every day. The models honestly feel on par, but the Harness and the CLI are somewhat painful to work with.

Yeah, fair. I should've specifically asked for CC/adaptive-thinking to be returned to a working state and not the model itself.

The alternative is to price their product transparently. If there is too much demand and supply is limited: Charge more.

Anthropic wants to have their lunch (low apparent prices, increased market share) and eat it too (controlled costs, adequate production to serve the demand).

They're advertising themselves as a $5 All-You-Can-Eat buffet, but then aggressively and arbitrarily restricting admission, sneakily swapping out the high-quality ingredients for garbage-tier slop, and kicking out anyone who even utters the words "to go box" or "doggie bag".

Would you want to eat at that restaurant?

Then go eat at a different restaurant...

It sounds looks you're upset that something was obviously too good to be true.

If they can't serve all their existing customers maybe they should stop accepting new customers until they can?

Maybe they could not sell more if they’re already exceeding capacity? What kind of apologism is this?

I cancelled my subscription so not really defending them myself but if all of their customers were humans who used it normally I bet they could serve everyone. It's when someone presses a few keys walks away and a bot uses tokens for 72 hours straight that it becomes a problem. Then people buy 3 accounts and do that for weeks at a time.

Could you do that as a human? Sure but you'd likely burn out after a couple of weeks. Also the human would probably use those tokens far more effectively and would not need as many. It's feels the same as someone installing a crypto miner on their servers in my mind. Abhorrent behavior.

I've been very content moving away from OneDrive/GDrive to a personal NAS setup with Synology/Ugreen. You can access a shared drive/photo drive and use Tailscale to mount your volume from anywhere.

I've also configured encrypted cloud backups to a different geographic region and off-site backups to a friend's NAS (following the 3-2-1 backup rule). It does help having 2.5Gb networking as well, but owning your data is more important in the coming age of sloppy/degrading infrastructure and ransomware attacks.