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.