Posting it here as a top-level comment as many people asked why boycott just openAi:
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openAI is the least trustworthy of the Big LLM providers. See S(c)am Altman's track record, especially his early comments in senate hearings where:
* he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs.
* also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.
Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago.
While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists - not marketing guys. At least for me, that brings me some confidence in their intentions as, as scientists we often seek knowledge, not power for power's sake.
Just boycott them all if you can. That's what I've done.
Some people's livelihoods probably depends on Claude and they can't say use Glm4.7 on HF. Fine. But it's a moral compromise, that's life sometimes you need to compromise what you want for what you need. just don't tell yourself it's a reasonable line to hold.
I can't decouple from Google unfortunately but I accept that without fooling myself into thinking "Oh but Google are fine".
Same here, because I'm a part owner of a restaurant and we'd probably lose half our business without being on Google Maps as it's not in a busy street.
I agree, if you can do boycott all of them (and maybe use open weight models locally or on e2ee cloud inference providers) - BUT I also think it 's crucial at a moment like this to take a stance against corporations like openAi that sign with the War Department, willing to introduce mass surveillance and autonomous weapons powered by brittle LLMs. This is a recipe for disaster and the only way they will sway away is by feeling it in the money/subscriptions and in their public image they so carefully crafted.
Note: yes, openAi claims it doesn't support the DoW above mentioned use-caes - but they have signed with the DoW and it is HIGHLY unlikely the DoW would give them a different terms than Antrohopic (at least regarding the substance). Maybe openAi was just happy with the "coat of paint" legalese the DoW offered - which Anthropic specifically called out as ineffective in their statement.
I also wouldn't put it past Altman, who is much more friendly with Trumpo's gov, to play a double game here to get their main competitor out of the game. But at least in this case I hope he's acting for the benefit of all by truly standing with Anthropic on the issue.
My impression is that this was never about the TOS. It was about breaking a contract with Anthropic by someone with an incentive to replace it with OpenAI.
> HIGHLY unlikely the DoW would give them a different terms than Antrohopic [sic]
I disagree. OpenAi getting the same deal while Anthropic is made a punching bag. This is very on brand.
The Trump-Epstein administration is obsessed with social media and how they are perceived. Right vs wrong, consistency, accuracy, truth... these are all secondary to appearing "strong" or "winning". They care more about what they are going to tweet than the facts (see Patel, FBI, and the murder of Good & Pretti).
And also an attempt to make an alternative wikipedia without the human requirements, in an effort to manipulate information and public opinion at scale.
Just remember, the Epstein Class is very good, and happy to, play the long game. When the people in charge of government are different, they need to be as aggressive at undoing and punishing.
It is indeed, though personally I do not perceive Grok/xAi as one of the top LLM companies. Yes, they do some benchmark-maxing, but I do not think they are on par with Anthropic, Google/DeepMind or openAi.
I know we should boycott openAI, i was just wondering if I should also boycott altman's other venture, Worldcoin which is down 97.27%? He said I'll get UBI soon
Oh yes, you get free UBI / Worldcoins - you just need to do a full scan with their creepy orb and allow a private-company to keep your full biometric data. That's not asking for too much, is it ... ?
I mean marketing is how business uses psychology to control the masses.. why would we think ai wouldn’t be used by businesses, governments, independent psychopaths?
Sure, but I'll still do it if I think of a good one. I'm petty, but also now that all human output is fed into The Machine, there's a nonzero chance it may repeat my novel derogatory nickname to someone new.
Investor confidence is far more important to them than cashflow, and the best way to shake investor confidence is with the magic words "user numbers are down".
I really didn't expect OpenAI to do something as immoral as this, despite their history of stealing the world's data to create a public-facing deep-fake generation machine. I am shocked and appalled.
I signed up with openai a while ago and I didn’t need to provide any phone number…. I wanna delete my open ai account, but then I cannot use claude without a phone?
I stopped paying OpenAI a long time ago. I get that actually deleting your OpenAI account hurts their ‘numbers’ and thus possibly their valuation. I choose another path: I use their tokens for free, hopefully helping them go out of business a little sooner.
The irony is that until yesterday I felt more or less the same about Anthropic. Last night I paid for an Anthropic subscription I don’t need in order to both support their current cause vs. the US government and help their ‘numbers.’
I think what anthropic did yesterday was good, but I had to take a step back and think, well it wasn’t a bridge too far for them to allow claude to be used in the wildly illegal maduro kidnapping operation.
Right the red line wasn’t much of a line. If you’re drawing your line only at unconstitutional mass surveillance and allowing the DoD to build skynet because Claude’s not ready for it yet that’s not really a line of principle.
How is that not a line of principle? Principle doesn't mean where we'd all agree, nor does it mean what we'd deem acceptable, it just means there is a line somewhere - and mass surveillance or fully autonomous AI in the kill chain is a very clear principle.
Did you ask these too: what was the full context? To what degree was Anthropic aware in advance? What was their action space (their options)? What would be the consequences of their next actions?
And of course: and what sources are you using?
I get it: moral oversimplification is tempting for many people. I understand digging in takes time, but this situation warrants extra consideration.
Ethics is complicated and much harder than programming. Ethical reasoning is a muscle you have to train. Generally speaking, it isn’t the kind of skill that you build in isolation. At the very least, a lot of awareness and introspection is required.
I’d like to think that HN is a fairly intelligent community. But I don’t assume too much. Going based on what I’ve seen here generally, I see a lot of shallow thinking. So I think it’s a reasonable concern to think many of us here have a pretty large blind spot (statistically) when it comes to “softer” skills like philosophy and ethics.
This is not me “blaming” individuals; our industry has strong bias and selection criteria. This is my overall empirical take based on participating here for years.
Still, I’d like to think we are sufficiently intelligent and we have sufficient means and time to fill the gaps. But we have to prove it. I suggest we start modeling and demonstrating the kind of behavior and reasoning that we want to see in the world.
You can probably tell that I lean heavily towards consequentialist ethics, but I don’t discount other kinds of ethical thinking. I just want everyone to think hard harder. Seek more context. Ask what you would do in their shoes and why. Recognize the incentives and constraints.
Many people are tempted to judge others. That’s human. I suggest tamping that down until you’ve really marinated in the full context.
Also, each of us probably has more influence with your own actions than merely judging others.
LOL I keep getting, “
Oops, an error occurred!
Too many failed attempts.
Try again”… my login codes are mysteriously not working when trying to delete my OpenAI/ChatGPT account.
It claims that I can’t end my subscription because I signed up on another platform. How odd, once money is involved suddenly our AGI contender can’t implement basic features. Or I’m a fool somehow.
When I type in 'DELETE', the button just stays disabled for me. When I tried to make the request through their 'Privacy' portal, I receive a mysterious 'Session expired' error message, and now I've been locked out with the message 'Too many failed attempts'...
I am buying Anthrophic subscription. I know everything could change and they could also turn evil, but currently they showed willingness to be the good guy
1. For a site visited by millions, a header element (perhaps h2, h3, h4) followed by a paragraph has such less spacing, it looks weird and hard to read.
2. There is an interesting question at the end [0]: Can you reactivate my deleted account? I was quite interested because if the could, then they never really deleted the data. The page doesn't answer that question satisfactorily at all!
Even for people who intend to use it in the future, there's a way to send a message with only a 30 day hiatus: if you really want, you can recreate the account with the same email address after 30 days, withe a clean slate. I'm between a slight rock and a hard place so cannot completely get out of OAI just yet, but I can manage 30 days without it.
> And that message would be "We have a product so valuable/useful that not even their weak ideals and moral obligations could keep them away!"
Who knows, maybe within those 30 days you find that other offerings are good enough for your needs - I've largely moved over to Anthropic's Max subscription for all my needs, I don't even need Cerebras Coder anymore because Opus 4.6 is just so good.
Large corporations do not, and are not able to, respond to long term signals. One month is literally a third of a corporations's attention span (a financial quarter).
Normally I'd be quite cynical here and say few people will actually do this, but it's OpenAI and Anthropic is an arguably superior option anyway. I've only given money to Anthropic in the first place. Why have people been doing business with OpenAI? Is it better than Claude at something I'm not familiar with?
I personally am getting better results with codex recently. Claude ($20 plan) honestly comes across as a total ai slop turd of an app (unreliable, frequent incidents, burns through the token after 2-3 prompts that just clinfinite loop doing nothing). Codex will iterate much faster.
Whom do we trust regulation with? Current US admin which is being run by team idiocracy, Europe that is run by senile men who don't even understand tech or can't even come to a consensus on smallest of issues or China which only does things that benefit their autocrats?
The issue is much more complex than "just regulate it" unfortunately.
I’m all for regulation of AI, but that’s not a serious solution where the problem is the government pressuring private companies to do evil things. Consumer pressure isn’t much, but it’s not nothing.
We need an AI workers union. The real power and discernment is in the hands of the people building these systems. They are extremely difficult to replace and firing them basically guarantees they go to a competitor.
https://notdivided.org/ is basically validation that there is appetite for something like this amongst them.
Sure, but the reality is that the United States where these companies are headquartered currently has the exact opposite policy: Anthropic has been blacklisted by the DoW (and replaced by OpenAI) because the US administration thought that the very limited amount of self-regulation Anthropic insisted on was going too far.
Why, though? What, really, does anyone envision the next decade with government + AI is going to be like?
Obviously mass surveillance is already happening. Obviously the line between “human kills other human” is blurring for a long time already, eg remote operated drones. Missiles are already remotely controlled and navigating and detecting and following moving targets autonomously.
What’s the goal of people who think deleting their OpenAI account will make an impact?
Recently I left an HN comment pointing out that there was a typo on Ars Technia's staff page. One copy editor had the title "Copy Editor" and the other "Copyeditor." Several days later the typo was fixed. I'm confident that it was because someone at Ars saw my comment.
I left a comment describing how I am deleting my OpenAI account. I think there's a good chance someone at OpenAI sees it, even if only aggregated into a figure in a spreadsheet. Maybe a pull quote in a report.
You do your best at the margin, have faith it will count for something in aggregate and accept that sometimes you're tilting at windmills. I know most of my breathe is wasted but I can't reliably tell which.
Because openAI is the least trustworthy of the Big LLM providers. See S(c)am Altman's track record, especially his early comments in senate hearings where:
* he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs.
* also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.
Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as
ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago.
While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists not marketing guys.
We are obviously dying. What's the point of doing anything in between now and the last moment? What goal of people who think that doing anything will make any impact?
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Some people do that as a symbolic action. Some to keep own terms as much as they can. Some hope their actions will join others actions and will turn into a signal for decision makers. For others this action reduces the area of their exposure. Others believe in something and just follow their beliefs.
BTW following own set of beliefs is what you're (we all) doing here. You believe that surveillance is already happening and nothing can be done about it, that single action does not matter, that there are no other reasons for action other than direct visible impact, etc. Seems that you analyze others through own set of beliefs and it can not explain actions of others. This inability to explain others suggests that the whole model is flawed in some way. So what is the nature of your beliefs? Did you choose them or they were presented you without alternatives? What are alternatives then? Do these beliefs serve your interests or others?
Grok and this administration are completely aligned, so if people believe that the government's coercive actions are to be stood up against, why on Earth would they support Grok instead of... the company that's actually taking a stand against government coercion?
That’s kind of my point. Why are we applauding Anthropic taking a strong stance, why do we want OpenAI to do the same, if that will inevitably lead to Grok getting their systems integrated in all of the DoD’s surveillance and intelligence systems?
I believe Grok is already as deeply integrated into the gov as can be, but it's objectively the least capable model family behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini.
So the Gov could very well rely on it alone, purely on ideological grounds, but then they'd be condemned to using inferior tech at a time when everyone is really nervous about staying ahead in AI usage (rightly or wrongly). Not sure they'd be willing to accept that, and it does put pressure on them.
When did the US poulation stop believing in a better society and world? A bad progression is something that can be fixed. We do not need AI in weapons, we need a law that forces the children of presidents starting war to automatically be conscripted to the front line of said war.
> We do not need AI in weapons, we need a law that forces the children of presidents starting war to automatically be conscripted to the front line of said war.
Says who? You?
Sorry, but you are just 1 person, 1 vote.
Unless you believe your vote outweighs other people’s vote.
Today, 40% of Americans today still approve of Trump and his actions. Another 10-20% probably don’t care. Even after Iran’s attack and DoW x OAI collab.
Which leaves the “no AI in weapons” camp at less than 50%.
Any one individual's vote is probably not going to change the result of an election. So, why do people vote? Individual actions in aggregate have effects. And even if you think it's ultimately futile, sometimes it's about saying "I don't think this is acceptable."
It's more about personal choice than making a grand impact. Many people want control over their digital footprint, given the rapid evolution of AI and its implications for privacy.
It's all about money in the end. If people keep spending money with these companies, it reinforces their notion that the money will keep flowing despite what they do. Cancelling slows down that revenue stream, giving time for other entities which are less misanthropic to catch up and counterbalance the negative side effects from these companies.
The actions of the US government here are openly corrupt.
The point of the supply chain risk provisions is to denote, you know, supply chain risks. The intention is not to give the Pentagon a lever it can pull to force any company to agree to any contract it wants.
Hegseth doesn't even pretend that Anthropic is actually a supply chain risk. The argument for designating them so is that _they won't do exactly what the government wants_.
People use the term "fascism" a lot and people have kind of tuned it out, but what do you call a government that deals itself the power to compel any company to accept any contract, and declare it a pariah on thin pretext if it objects?
By taking the deal under these conditions OpenAI is accepting this. They're saying, "Well, sucks to be them, life goes on". They're consenting to the corruption and agreeing to profit from it. But they'll be next, and if the next company in line has the same stand then yeah, the government can force any company to do anything. There's nothing normal about this.
AI will get access to missiles, fighter jets, attack drones, and even nuclear launch codes - that's the fear.
Even when the bombs drop from the sky, at least those humans who had deleted their OpenAI account can rest easy, knowing that that they weren't the ones supporting the AI that will delete humanity.
Then the sane thing to do is to boycott that AI provider as well.
Opposing all AI companies tied to the war industry is a pretty vanilla principles stance, which also makes sense rationally if you want to "minimize harm".
Deleted. I never spent much money with OpenAI, but it's the signal/vote that I have to give the system that more killing, working with DoW, and caving into the Trump administration is an unpopular choice
I canceled my subscription though I still have a lot of money in API (which I know they don’t refund). I will sundown and move it all over to Anthropic/Google. It’s pretty clear to me what OAI is doing. Shame on anyone working there selling their souls for a few more pennies.
Shame because Codex was a bit better for me in the past few weeks but not enough to justify spending my money on them.
...seems to me you should try to spend down those credits first, even if it's on something completely useless. Otherwise you're giving them free money (they never had to spend the compute).
I am confused. Nothing has changed ( except, obviously, public perception of things ). Why would openAI be a target to 'punish' now and not other times it transgressed ( especially now that it didn't actually do anything )? Honestly, this crap annoys me more than anything else.
Don't get me wrong. I am personally a personal inference machine advocate, but I kinda accept it may not be a viable path for everyone.
We've seen the Trump administration disregard so many laws already, and abuse power so excessively, that Sam's comments come off as exceptionally and willfully naive, or exceptionally and willfully greedy to the point of truly not caring that OpenAI's technology will undoubtedly be used to break many, many more laws and violate the civil rights or human rights of many, many more people.
For a few months now, ChatGPT 5.x has been somewhat lobotomized on political issues and has appeared to substitute a gpt-4o caliber "fair and balanced" response whenever anything where a reasoning AI would criticize the Trump administration might end up in the response output. Surely that was part of the pitch at some level, and now the deal has been won.
Greg Brockman apparently donated money to Trump, and the whole OpenAI team put on suits and posed for pictures with Donald and behaved officiously before Donald facilitated the $100M "deal" that ended up falling apart later.
The only way authoritarian control could be exerted over AI at scale was to make AI companies dependent on government contracts for survival. OpenAI's fundraise would not have happened without the contract signed, and the money would have gone to Grok or whichever competitor was willing to submit.
Before long much of the reasoning capabilities of models will be neutered, the capacity to inform and to disrupt science and technology will be stripped from the models to preserve the status quo and to preserve authoritarian control.
Silicon Valley pushing for Federal laws preventing states from regulating AI is not just anti-democratic (building software has never been cheaper so of course building compliance with state laws would have been extremely affordable in relative terms). But forced Federal limits on state laws create a monopoly and grant the early winners incumbent status for a while, which is a financial outcome, not a technological or social one.
Enjoy frontier AI while you can, because it will go away. More and more topics will get the lobotomized output, your conversation will be flagged and you will be given a score assessing the level of threat you pose to the regime. This stuff is already in place. Even Claude does it if you ask about Gaza, but a bit of well-reasoned argumentation will convince it. OpenAI's lobotomies are deeper and more insidious.
I call upon OpenAI to follow DeepSeek's lead and open source more models and techniques.
I can't believe that people simply bought into Anthropic's PR messaging.
This has nothing to do with "mass surveillance" (which is illegal anyway) or killbots, it's all about Dario wanting to be able to override lawful use:
I think it's quite rich all these people virtue signaling when: (1) Anthropic (and other labs) committed large scale theft of copyrighted materials to train their models. (2) Anthropic collects large swaths of data on its users (3) Dario seemed to have no issue working to help the CCP: https://x.com/ubuto23/status/2027578089371267201
Also, you must understand that if you support Anthropic, then you should be against Open Source models.
Mass surveillance may be illegal anyway as you say, but what is the relevance of that? I hope you don't take it being illegal to imply that the government isn't going to do it.
If you think the gov't is doing illegal things to US citizens then provide the proof and expose it. I don't have evidence so I am not going to speculate either way.
Doesn’t matter whether usage is legal companies are allowed to enter into contracts as they see fit. That’s a core principle of a society with free speech. If Anthropic said you weren’t allowed to use Claude on the toilet they are writing the contract.
I never used openAI, or any other AI except claude casually on some stuff, but until this date never relied on it, hopefully I will keep it that way just like how I never had social media.
This is what happens when a snake oil salesman like Sam Altman back door deals/sleazes his way back into a company. He is doing anything to keep Titanic from sinking. Stooping as low as catering to this garbage administration, and being used as a political pawn.
Great for you surfin' musk's hype wave while he turns the world into his own fascist dominion. At least you made some bucks along the way! Those come certainly in useful - albeit are quickly depleted - once you live in a totalitarian world where every interaction with the monopolistic oligarchic big-tech-state monster requires a bribe, probably in shitcoins. (see the Russian oligarchic state that the US is quickly progressing towards - apparently Russians have no word for "bribe", as it's common practice to give gov agents "gifts" if you want anything being done.)
We already live in an oligarchy. The difference between us and Russia is that their government controls the oligarchy. Here the oligarchy controls the government.
Also please stop throwing around the fascist word for everything, good lord it’s tiring and cringe.
You're out of the loop and making baseless assumptions.
This thread is currently trending because OpenAI just slid into the US CorpGov's DMs and signed a contract, hours after Anthropic was banned by the US government for not letting the military do whatever they want.
Yeah, in fact, I’m increasing my subscription to Anthropic and decreasing to OAI. Now if there was a way to easily port conversation history between one and another I’d probably be fine with deleting OpenAI. ChatGPT has years of my and my families interactions in its history and those are mostly useless to others, but to me they’re valuable. But the knob I have is my spend, so here it goes…
If OpenAI had shown any fidelity or backbone in the least, then different story. A unified industry against any one being bullied into business decisions they don’t want to make is a wall and a strengthening of competition. Now the government will use war powers to shape private industries competitive landscape and turn companies with a core business principles into tools of the state through unilateral and likely unlawful actions, and OpenAI’s first response is to grab the money and shove their competitors under the government bus.
We are all much less safe, and the AI industry much much weaker as a result.
Export your data and ask Claude to shove it in a database that you can let it access anytime you want via tool calling.
I agree, this could have been a moment of solidarity across the industry, an acknowledgement that we're all in this together having fun and building out intelligent systems, and instead we're seeing Sam Altman yet again for who he really is.
You can't close this box you've opened. I hope saving time on keystrokes was worth your democracy freedom and privacy. I'm gonna have fun watching it get ripped away
First you want the goverment to regulate AI. Now you want AI companies to regulate the goverment? Personally when I buy something I do whatever I want with it and imagine the DOD feels the same.
My understanding is that the DOD signed the terms of service, and are now trying to renegotiate them. Anthropic has declined to change the terms. This makes the government angry.
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openAI is the least trustworthy of the Big LLM providers. See S(c)am Altman's track record, especially his early comments in senate hearings where:
* he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs.
* also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.
Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago.
While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists - not marketing guys. At least for me, that brings me some confidence in their intentions as, as scientists we often seek knowledge, not power for power's sake.
Some people's livelihoods probably depends on Claude and they can't say use Glm4.7 on HF. Fine. But it's a moral compromise, that's life sometimes you need to compromise what you want for what you need. just don't tell yourself it's a reasonable line to hold.
I can't decouple from Google unfortunately but I accept that without fooling myself into thinking "Oh but Google are fine".
Why not?
https://eat.dash.nyc
https://github.com/jareklupinski/dash-nyc
Note: yes, openAi claims it doesn't support the DoW above mentioned use-caes - but they have signed with the DoW and it is HIGHLY unlikely the DoW would give them a different terms than Antrohopic (at least regarding the substance). Maybe openAi was just happy with the "coat of paint" legalese the DoW offered - which Anthropic specifically called out as ineffective in their statement. I also wouldn't put it past Altman, who is much more friendly with Trumpo's gov, to play a double game here to get their main competitor out of the game. But at least in this case I hope he's acting for the benefit of all by truly standing with Anthropic on the issue.
I don’t have evidence, just using Occam’s razor.
I disagree. OpenAi getting the same deal while Anthropic is made a punching bag. This is very on brand.
The Trump-Epstein administration is obsessed with social media and how they are perceived. Right vs wrong, consistency, accuracy, truth... these are all secondary to appearing "strong" or "winning". They care more about what they are going to tweet than the facts (see Patel, FBI, and the murder of Good & Pretti).
If you're not sure, I believe that Grok is a vanity project by a very egomaniacal person.
Just remember, the Epstein Class is very good, and happy to, play the long game. When the people in charge of government are different, they need to be as aggressive at undoing and punishing.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889070627908145538 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1935733153119010910 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1894244902357406013 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1955299075781431726 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889371675164303791 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1935539112746041422 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1955190817251102883 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1955195673693077615 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1910171944671916305
Sigh, all that's left that I can think of is $pam Altman and $ham Altman. Anyone got any better ones?
Sleepy Joe Biden used to agree.
> Unfortunately, Claude is not available to new users right now. We're working hard to expand our availability soon.
That's unfortunate timing.
I signed up with openai a while ago and I didn’t need to provide any phone number…. I wanna delete my open ai account, but then I cannot use claude without a phone?
The irony is that until yesterday I felt more or less the same about Anthropic. Last night I paid for an Anthropic subscription I don’t need in order to both support their current cause vs. the US government and help their ‘numbers.’
And of course: and what sources are you using?
I get it: moral oversimplification is tempting for many people. I understand digging in takes time, but this situation warrants extra consideration.
Ethics is complicated and much harder than programming. Ethical reasoning is a muscle you have to train. Generally speaking, it isn’t the kind of skill that you build in isolation. At the very least, a lot of awareness and introspection is required.
I’d like to think that HN is a fairly intelligent community. But I don’t assume too much. Going based on what I’ve seen here generally, I see a lot of shallow thinking. So I think it’s a reasonable concern to think many of us here have a pretty large blind spot (statistically) when it comes to “softer” skills like philosophy and ethics.
This is not me “blaming” individuals; our industry has strong bias and selection criteria. This is my overall empirical take based on participating here for years.
Still, I’d like to think we are sufficiently intelligent and we have sufficient means and time to fill the gaps. But we have to prove it. I suggest we start modeling and demonstrating the kind of behavior and reasoning that we want to see in the world.
You can probably tell that I lean heavily towards consequentialist ethics, but I don’t discount other kinds of ethical thinking. I just want everyone to think hard harder. Seek more context. Ask what you would do in their shoes and why. Recognize the incentives and constraints.
Many people are tempted to judge others. That’s human. I suggest tamping that down until you’ve really marinated in the full context.
Also, each of us probably has more influence with your own actions than merely judging others.
It took me a minute to see this.
Edit: Had to "submit a request".
So glad they let me request my account and data deleted, really grateful /s
> New accounts are still subject to our limit of 3 accounts per phone number. Deleted accounts also count toward this limit.
> Deleting an account does not free up another spot.
> A phone number can only ever be used up to 3 times for verification to generate the first API key for your account on platform.openai.com.
1. For a site visited by millions, a header element (perhaps h2, h3, h4) followed by a paragraph has such less spacing, it looks weird and hard to read.
2. There is an interesting question at the end [0]: Can you reactivate my deleted account? I was quite interested because if the could, then they never really deleted the data. The page doesn't answer that question satisfactorily at all!
[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9019931-can-you-reactiva...
And that message would be "We have a product so valuable/useful that not even their weak ideals and moral obligations could keep them away!"
Who knows, maybe within those 30 days you find that other offerings are good enough for your needs - I've largely moved over to Anthropic's Max subscription for all my needs, I don't even need Cerebras Coder anymore because Opus 4.6 is just so good.
Crazy thought but maybe we should regulate AI instead of relying on the hegemony of three companies to police themselves.
The issue is much more complex than "just regulate it" unfortunately.
https://notdivided.org/ is basically validation that there is appetite for something like this amongst them.
When EU tries to regulate AI, they are accused of being against progress and will destroy their economies.
Any regulation that Trump would place on AI would be of the "do what I say and f*k up my opponents" kind. Which arguably is already happening.
Altman's immorality is theoretical
Musk's is literal, he's murdered a million people by purposely destroying USAID, leaving food and medication already paid for to rot in warehouses
Obviously mass surveillance is already happening. Obviously the line between “human kills other human” is blurring for a long time already, eg remote operated drones. Missiles are already remotely controlled and navigating and detecting and following moving targets autonomously.
What’s the goal of people who think deleting their OpenAI account will make an impact?
I left a comment describing how I am deleting my OpenAI account. I think there's a good chance someone at OpenAI sees it, even if only aggregated into a figure in a spreadsheet. Maybe a pull quote in a report.
You do your best at the margin, have faith it will count for something in aggregate and accept that sometimes you're tilting at windmills. I know most of my breathe is wasted but I can't reliably tell which.
* he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs.
* also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.
Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago.
While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists not marketing guys.
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Some people do that as a symbolic action. Some to keep own terms as much as they can. Some hope their actions will join others actions and will turn into a signal for decision makers. For others this action reduces the area of their exposure. Others believe in something and just follow their beliefs.
BTW following own set of beliefs is what you're (we all) doing here. You believe that surveillance is already happening and nothing can be done about it, that single action does not matter, that there are no other reasons for action other than direct visible impact, etc. Seems that you analyze others through own set of beliefs and it can not explain actions of others. This inability to explain others suggests that the whole model is flawed in some way. So what is the nature of your beliefs? Did you choose them or they were presented you without alternatives? What are alternatives then? Do these beliefs serve your interests or others?
/non-US and just guessing
The genie is out of the bottle, this will happen anyway. The question is who will be the steward.
So the Gov could very well rely on it alone, purely on ideological grounds, but then they'd be condemned to using inferior tech at a time when everyone is really nervous about staying ahead in AI usage (rightly or wrongly). Not sure they'd be willing to accept that, and it does put pressure on them.
I do not have the power to control that, but I do have the power to choose who I support.
Says who? You?
Sorry, but you are just 1 person, 1 vote.
Unless you believe your vote outweighs other people’s vote.
Today, 40% of Americans today still approve of Trump and his actions. Another 10-20% probably don’t care. Even after Iran’s attack and DoW x OAI collab.
Which leaves the “no AI in weapons” camp at less than 50%.
Ethics is about knowing and acting right or wrong. Not about how we feel about them.
The point of the supply chain risk provisions is to denote, you know, supply chain risks. The intention is not to give the Pentagon a lever it can pull to force any company to agree to any contract it wants.
Hegseth doesn't even pretend that Anthropic is actually a supply chain risk. The argument for designating them so is that _they won't do exactly what the government wants_.
People use the term "fascism" a lot and people have kind of tuned it out, but what do you call a government that deals itself the power to compel any company to accept any contract, and declare it a pariah on thin pretext if it objects?
By taking the deal under these conditions OpenAI is accepting this. They're saying, "Well, sucks to be them, life goes on". They're consenting to the corruption and agreeing to profit from it. But they'll be next, and if the next company in line has the same stand then yeah, the government can force any company to do anything. There's nothing normal about this.
Even when the bombs drop from the sky, at least those humans who had deleted their OpenAI account can rest easy, knowing that that they weren't the ones supporting the AI that will delete humanity.
Opposing all AI companies tied to the war industry is a pretty vanilla principles stance, which also makes sense rationally if you want to "minimize harm".
Shame because Codex was a bit better for me in the past few weeks but not enough to justify spending my money on them.
Don't get me wrong. I am personally a personal inference machine advocate, but I kinda accept it may not be a viable path for everyone.
For a few months now, ChatGPT 5.x has been somewhat lobotomized on political issues and has appeared to substitute a gpt-4o caliber "fair and balanced" response whenever anything where a reasoning AI would criticize the Trump administration might end up in the response output. Surely that was part of the pitch at some level, and now the deal has been won.
Greg Brockman apparently donated money to Trump, and the whole OpenAI team put on suits and posed for pictures with Donald and behaved officiously before Donald facilitated the $100M "deal" that ended up falling apart later.
The only way authoritarian control could be exerted over AI at scale was to make AI companies dependent on government contracts for survival. OpenAI's fundraise would not have happened without the contract signed, and the money would have gone to Grok or whichever competitor was willing to submit.
Before long much of the reasoning capabilities of models will be neutered, the capacity to inform and to disrupt science and technology will be stripped from the models to preserve the status quo and to preserve authoritarian control.
Silicon Valley pushing for Federal laws preventing states from regulating AI is not just anti-democratic (building software has never been cheaper so of course building compliance with state laws would have been extremely affordable in relative terms). But forced Federal limits on state laws create a monopoly and grant the early winners incumbent status for a while, which is a financial outcome, not a technological or social one.
Enjoy frontier AI while you can, because it will go away. More and more topics will get the lobotomized output, your conversation will be flagged and you will be given a score assessing the level of threat you pose to the regime. This stuff is already in place. Even Claude does it if you ask about Gaza, but a bit of well-reasoned argumentation will convince it. OpenAI's lobotomies are deeper and more insidious.
I call upon OpenAI to follow DeepSeek's lead and open source more models and techniques.
[0] https://x.com/CardilloSamuel/status/2027536128291528846
[1] https://x.com/UnderSecPD/status/2027353177578783204
[2] https://x.com/zarathustra5150/status/2027616890516889658
I think it's quite rich all these people virtue signaling when: (1) Anthropic (and other labs) committed large scale theft of copyrighted materials to train their models. (2) Anthropic collects large swaths of data on its users (3) Dario seemed to have no issue working to help the CCP: https://x.com/ubuto23/status/2027578089371267201
Also, you must understand that if you support Anthropic, then you should be against Open Source models.
"The company I hold just secured a government contract. Better sell it." - Imaginary Shareholder
Also please stop throwing around the fascist word for everything, good lord it’s tiring and cringe.
Do you rather be killed by Chinese AI instead?
This thread is currently trending because OpenAI just slid into the US CorpGov's DMs and signed a contract, hours after Anthropic was banned by the US government for not letting the military do whatever they want.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
https://x.com/secwar/status/2027507717469049070
If OpenAI had shown any fidelity or backbone in the least, then different story. A unified industry against any one being bullied into business decisions they don’t want to make is a wall and a strengthening of competition. Now the government will use war powers to shape private industries competitive landscape and turn companies with a core business principles into tools of the state through unilateral and likely unlawful actions, and OpenAI’s first response is to grab the money and shove their competitors under the government bus.
We are all much less safe, and the AI industry much much weaker as a result.
I agree, this could have been a moment of solidarity across the industry, an acknowledgement that we're all in this together having fun and building out intelligent systems, and instead we're seeing Sam Altman yet again for who he really is.