With the recent news of Anthropic going public within the next couple of months or more, I really hope that they keep their promise and vision on not selling users data and keeping everyone’s data private. Besides Claude being the best LLM IMO and also tons of other people who share the same opinion because it’s true, the other top reason why I only started using Anthropic LLMs last year was because of privacy and security. I only use Claude and I use it all the time, on my phone, desktop app with MPC, Claude Code some, and website. I like privacy, knowing that my usage isn’t being sold, looked through, used to be researched and used for other power of if I am getting good products and usage out of it to further my own development. Say I come up with something really useful, I don’t want say OpenAI or other companies like Google with their Gemini taking my info and using it for whatever. I’m sure that’s what they are doing, monitoring their users and if they come up with good things they copy it or just your ideas and such aren’t yours. It’s like sharing ideas with friends or people around in any fashion, but you either hint at something or don’t tell them what you’re doing or thinking, then them going off and stealing your idea, or a startup failing because someone else somehow knew your idea or product as you started working on it.
My ideas are mine and regardless if I build it with a LLM from Anthropic or any other LLM I feel like it’s still the users info and IP if it’s not something that was already IP or owned by someone else out on the internet if that info was taken from there. I can code and all, come up with ideas, make products or anything else. The only thing is time, effort, and execution.
I can see shareholders wanting to sell users data, data scrape it, sell their ideas and products, thoughts, personal information, health information, life stories, data from research, math equations or new ways of doing things, breakthroughs, etc. I for one would hate this to happen. The markets are honestly one of the best things when used correctly, but also one of the worst things. I seriously don’t like or believe in all this data sharing between everyone and these companies that are for insane profits, feels like your data regardless of what it is, isn’t yours. So many people share things on the web for free and Idk why a lot of the times. It’s like Microsoft thinking they have a good OS, when in reality they just shoved themselves into a market to have a chance and it stuck, even though it’s terrible.
TL;DR if you’re one of those people: When or if Anthropic goes public on the stock exchange all I care for is the usages and more importantly the current privacy and MOTO to be maintained. If that isn’t kept then Idk what I’ll do. I’ll still use it but I’ll be real pissed. I’ll just have to get all what I’m trying to do before that day comes and delete my chats. I’ve lived by the saying somewhat the last few years, “Do everything and realize as much as you can as soon as possible.” This way you take advantage of things and not have issues down the line for whatever happens in life. Go first.
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In any case, if your data is stored on a US server, there is no reason to believe that it is safe.
The problem with most APIs/subscriptions is the total lack of clarity that service providers maintain regarding confidentiality. What security measures are in place to prevent criminal data leaks? What long-term commitments are needed, as you point out? Most tech sectors work closely with the government and federal agencies, they are subject to the same financial pressures than other tech companies... It is not without reason that, for example, European public research strongly advises scientists against using foreign services. Even EU servers are susceptible to the US Cloud Act. And I'm not even talking about China... (which at least has the merit of offering us solutions to run locally/VM). I handle sensitive data (in-depth interviews with individuals, life stories, political opinions, etc.). It's impossible for me to trust anything other than a local solution or a national cloud like OVH (and even then...) or the Mistral API (Wait... Mistral mostly uses US servers, lol).
I admit that it's generally frustrating compared to Anthropic's models.
Shareholders are just one of the problems with these services. It's the entire globalized American economic system that calls for caution. We've clearly seen that the right to confidentiality is the first security lock to be broken in our liberal democracies when it suits certain sectors of the administration and economy. Diplomacy can do nothing, even the leaders are being wiretapped and the only thing they can think to do is back down (Merkel and Hollande, at the time).
I recently watched a documentary about how the CIA, through its IQT investment fund, had carried out a takeover bid for GemPlus, the pioneering French smart card company. Opaque, unfair practices (the fact that the CEO of GemPlus wasn't very intelligent helped)... In order to have access to and management of the encryption keys, telecommunications networks. I have no reason to believe that all of this has changed in 25 years : There will always be an incentive to make this data available to the American government and economic actors: whether it is for product improvement (competitiveness) or threat management (internal security and surveillance).
It makes me sound like a doomer, a conspiracy theorist, a pessimist... But I ultimately find that the dystopias of the 20th century were very insightful about the risks of modern information-oriented societies.
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You have no way of knowing what they are really doing with your data, you just have to trust them. Unless you run opensource AIs on your own machine and then disconnect them from the Internet, you really have no idea what is going on with your data...
Yesterday