Summarizer

> "Anti-distillation: injecting fake tools to poison copycats" Plot twist: Chinese competitors end up developing real, useful versions of Claude's fake tools.

Sure, AI progress comes to a halt then as everyone switches to the copycats that can't innovate, and the frontier companies are bled dry.

"frontier" as in the frontier of using everybody else's code, books, art of everyone else for a specific purpose that was never intended to, as in, not even open source projects ever imagined LLMs becoming a thing and their licenses reflected as much.

You have a very poor understanding of LLMs if you think that is the frontier today. Maybe in 2024 it was.

Please educate us then.

Poor babies. Again, I don’t care about them.

These companies don't get the chance to raise a trillion dollars, and you're laughing???

Qwen are the only guys doing real innovation. (LLM architectures and such.) Everyone else is just gaming engagement metrics and benchmarks.

Tbh, I think distillation is happening both ways. And at this stage, "quality" is stagnating, the main edge is the tooling. The harness of CC seems to be the best so far, and I wonder if this leak would equalize the usability.

Definitely. We can expect zAI, Qwen, Minimax CCs very soon

Use Gemini or codex models

Biggest issue is that you need api keys which are extremely expensive. Unusable for normal business.

Meanwhile Claude Code is still awesome. I don’t see my self switching to OpenAI (seriously bad mgmt and possibly the first domino to fall if there is a correction) or Gemini (Google ethics cough cough).

I switched to Codex out of frustration with Claude Code and it has been surprisingly similar for my web and mobile coding needs

I sleep good at night, knowing that chatgpt saves me from the world wide web hackers

Gemini is a terrible product, I spent $15K on it. Anthropic and OpenAI make better models, it used to be that Gemini cooked but I don't feel that way anymore

I'm normally suspicious but honestly they've been so massively supply-constrained that I don't think it really benefits them much. They're not worried about getting enough demand for the new models; they're worrying about keeping up with it. Granted, there's a small counterargument for mythos which is that it's probably going to be API-only not subscription

I hope cheap Chinese models will overtake Anthropic.

Probably an unpopular opinion but Anthropic are too popular for their own good. 1. They are loved, and for good reasons, Sonnet 4 was groundbreaking but Opus 4.6 was for many a turning point in realizing Agentic SDLC real potential. People moved from Cursor to Claude Code in droves, they loved the CLI approach (me too), and the LOVED the subsidized $200 max pro plan (what's not to love, pay $200 instead of $5000 to Cursor...) They are the underdog, the true alternative to "evil" OpenAI or "don't be evil" Google, really standing up against mass surveillance or use of AI for autonomous killing machines. They are standing for the little guy, they are the "what OpenAI should have been" (plus they have better models...) They are the Apple of the AI era. 2. They are too loved, so loved that it protects them from legitimate criticism. They make GitHub's status page look good, and they make comcast customer service look like Amazon's. (At least Comcast has customer service), They are "If Dario shoots a customer in the middle of 5th avenue it won't hurt their sales one bit" level of liked. The fact they have the best models (for now) might be their achilles heel, because it hides other issues that might be in the blindspot. And as soon as a better model comes out from a competitor (and it could happen... if you recall OpenAI were the undisputed kinds with GPT 4o for a bit) these will become much more obvious. 3. This can hurt them in the long run. Eventually you can't sustain a business where you have not even 2 9s of SLA, can't handle customer support or sales (either with humans or worse for them - if they can't handle this with AI how do they expect to sell their own dream where AI does everything?). I'm sure they'll figure it out, they have huge growth and these are growth pains, but at some point, if they don't catch up with demand, the demand won't stay there forever the moment OpenAI/Google/someone else release a better model. 4. They inadvertently made all of the cybersecurity sector a potential enemy. Yes, all of them use Anthropic models, and probably many of them use Claude Code, but they know they might be paying the bills of their biggest competitor. Their shares drop whenever Anthropic even hints of a new model. Investors cut their valuations because they worry Anthropic will eat them for breakfast. I don't know about you, but if you ask me, having the people who live and breath security indirectly threatened by you, is not the best thing in the world, especially when your source code is out in the open for them to poke holes in... 5. the SaaS pocalypse - many of Claude Code's customers are... SaaS companies, that the same AI is "going to kill", again, if there was another provider that showed a bit more care about the entire businesses it's going to devour, if they also had even marginally better models... would the brand loyalty stay? Side note: I'm an Claude Enterprise customer, I can't get a human to respond to anything, even using the special "enterprise support" methods, and I'm not the only one, I know people who can't get a sales person, not to mention support, to buy 150 + seats (Anthropic's answer was - release self serve enterprise onboarding, which by the way is "pay us $20 which does not include usage, usage is at market prices, same as getting an API key", you pay for convenience and governance, p.s. you can't cancel enterprise, it's 20 seats min, for 1 year, in advance, so make sure you really need it, the team plan is great for most cases but it lacks the $200 plan, only the $100 5x plan).

Can somebody tell me what this means for the company?