u/SpiritualWindow3855

They genuinely seem to openly hate the fact they have users, and it reflects in every nook and cranny of the product from the messaging to UI flows. I've actually never seen this before at this scale of company, usually this is burnt out indie hacker microaggressions

• drops Sonnet 5 with nudges meant to trick less technical users into switching to it from stronger models.
• Had to be bullied out of silently messing with model weights to sabotage research
• open up CC and before you can resume work, Anthropic wants to nudge you into decisions over their compute bill (lobotomize your thread so we can save on compute?: Yes/No)
• try saving tokens by lowering the effort level... nope add some cognitive load to that simple task by presenting a full page warning about cache misses without the key information to actually make the decision (all this for an implementation detail entirely within their control btw).
• create world shaking squeeze for Fable with an artificial deadline... but then claim there's not enough compute for normal subscription use.

Just cartoonish how antagonistic the entire Anthropic product team is with their user base, and that makes them absolutely awful people to have building tools you rely on.

I wish so badly we had a more competitive market that could properly punish them for this.

Seeing as this keeps coming up (Inkwell, NanoGPT) I thought I'd make a post as an engineer working on things that include production LLM inference...

You cannot generate AI responses without access to the raw text. Anyone implying otherwise is being misleading.

They can promise not to read your chats, but there is no technology that can enforce it like for normal text.

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The technology that could change this one day (Homomorphic Encryption) is still years from being able to run on a chatbot site: the state of the art today is nearly 20-30 minutes for a 40 word response and is limited to small models. https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/935.pdf

There's also stuff like Trusted Execution Environments/Secure Enclaves/etc, but those protect the site from the people who own the hardware if the site is renting their hardware.

They do not protect you from the website, because the website is still in full control of the code running inside the enclave.

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The most a website can promise today is to encrypt your chat with your password right until it's on the server with the AI model, and encrypt it the moment inference is complete: but that still allows them to read the chat.

They have the plain text after all, they can just look at it and/or log it before encrypting it and sending it back.

tl;dr: you have to trust the site will choose not to read your chats.

If they're implying they cannot read your chats because of some privacy trick... they're lying. Which is not how you want to start your relationship with a website you're supposed to be trusting.

If you want absolute privacy the only option is to run the model locally in software that doesn't phone home.