Generally, yes. There is a lot of case law on various types of software automated contracting (robotic process automation, automated securities transactions, etc.). Exceptions are generally where the other party had knowledge or should have known that the agent didn't have legal authority on behalf of the party it purports to bind.
Sorry, what are you referring to by "verifying intent"? With narrow exceptions (wills, trusts, etc.), there's generally no requirement for a party to a contract to verify the mental state (if that is what you mean by intent) of the other party. There has to be some formal indication of intent to enter into a contract, but this is not what ordinary people think of by "intent", and it can be as simple as typing a name, clicking an approval button, or deploying a software tool to do something similar.
> ... there's generally no requirement for a party to a contract to verify the mental state (if that is what you mean by intent) of the other party ...
That's the ONLY requirement of a contract. There are NO other requirements in general. There does NOT have to be any indication beyond the intent to contract (e.g. payment of the first part of the price of a product, clearly indicating what you're paying for in words to a salesman, enters you into an enforceable contract to buy the thing even if you haven't signed anything yet)
And what Anthropic did here was enter someone else's name into a contract WITHOUT the intent of that person to enter in the contract being established. That they did not sign in their own name, but rather in the name of one of their customers changes things substantially.
>I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly.
There's a trend in some Eastern European countries to paint older brutalist concrete buildings as a cost-effective measure to reduce concrete spalling and do thermo-modernization. It's actually pretty amazing how much nicer some of these buildings look even with just a uniform white paint job (others involve more color).
Architects seem to be largely opposed, seeing it as an erasure of the material honesty that brutalism was supposed to represent, but IMHO it suggests that a lot of the core issue with these designs wasn't the shape or creativity of the buildings themselves but just the way the concrete look quickly aged.
>But why do the students of architecture prefer brutalism?
It's probably some combination of the subculture effect (i.e., subcultures tend to develop their own in-group aesthetics) and as a functional shibboleth (i.e., being able to "appreciate" things average people don't has an in-group signalling function).
The open question here is how is Anthropic retaining these exchanges?
If Moonshot is using the API, normally Anthropic would not retain the exchanges, at least that's the promise. If Anthropic is consistently retaining all exchanges from a class of customers because they're "flagged" but not notifying those customers, how can an average customer trust it won't happen to them?
If Moonshot is buying accounts and using those rather than the API, wouldn't they set the "no training on my data" flag in the settings so as to go undetected for longer? If so, we get back to the question of why would Anthropic be retaining the exchanges?
> If Moonshot is buying accounts and using those rather than the API, wouldn't they set the "no training on my data" flag in the settings so as to go undetected for longer? If so, we get back to the question of why would Anthropic be retaining the exchanges?
I would like to briefly draw your attention to this part of the Terms of Service [0]:
> We may use Materials to provide, maintain, and improve the Services and to develop other products and services, including training our models, unless you opt out of training through your account settings. Even if you opt out, we will use Materials for model training when: (1) you provide Feedback to us regarding any Materials, or (2) your Materials are flagged for safety review to improve our ability to detect harmful content, enforce our policies, or advance our safety research.
From the privacy policy [1]:
> We use your personal data for the following purposes:
> To prevent and investigate fraud, abuse, and violations of our Usage Policy, unlawful or criminal activity, unauthorized access to or use of personal data or Anthropic systems and networks, to protect our rights and the rights of others, to protect your safety or that of any other person, and to meet legal, governmental and institutional policy obligations;
Anthropic does offer a truly no data retention service, which is their "zero-data retention" agreement, which you have to sign and provide more documentation for than simply using either a normal consumer or API account. I doubt Moonshot did that, so by their terms, they can retain your data and use it for training if it's part of abuse prevention.
Notably, those are the consumer terms. The commercial terms [1] are much stricter about what Anthropic can do. That's one of the main draws of the Team plans over the individual plans (in addition to a couple dashboards, shared skills, etc). And as you mention, you can go even stricter as an enterprise customer with a zero-data retention agreement.
If Moonshot is using thousands of accounts through some proxy service those are most likely consumer accounts governed by the weaker ToS
I'm aware of that language in the terms, but I think most of us were under the (likely mistaken) impression that the safety review flagging focused on harmful content and safety (e.g., individuals discussing threatened real-world violence), not "safety" of Anthropic's intellectual property. And that it would likely result in retention of a handful of a customer's interactions, not all of them.
If the criteria for retention justifiable as safety at Anthropic are cast very broadly in actual practice, then it opens cans of worms for a lot of customers in complying with privacy regimes, customer IP protection, etc. It also raises the question of whether at least some subset of customers from certain geos (e.g., China likely, but perhaps other geos) may just automatically have everything flagged for retention, despite the terms, based on collective abuse risk flagging of their geo.
While ZDR is available, it's not available to all types of customers and is priced at a higher tier. Undoubtedly though this may be a wakeup call to some customers who didn't realize they may need ZDR to get on the ZDR bandwagon.
> While ZDR is available, it's not available to all types of customers and is priced at a higher tier.
This doesn’t match my experience with their API, they turned it on with some paperwork but it wasn’t fundamentally an issue of price. It’s the same API pricing either way.
>he specifically notes that they used the paid subscriptions, iirc.
Where are you seeing that? He only says "We used several LLMs throughout: Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, especially with GPT-5.6 Sol and, more recently, Astra. The latter was only used for writeups and auditing our arguments."
I might be missing something, but he doesn't seem to confirm that he opted out, at least in the written writeup, maybe he has on social media? He also likely had early access to Astra given the timing, and I thought early access customers couldn't opt out? (Am I wrong about that?)
API or consumer subscription? And did he share drafts of the work with anyone who fed it back in on a consumer subscription without disabling training?
I have reason to believe OpenAI doesn't respect training opt outs, but there is a good chance they let something get through without an opt-out too.
> And did he share drafts of the work with anyone who fed it back in on a consumer subscription without disabling training?
To this, the statement does have the following:
"... the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack"
Note his collaborator (Levent) works at Anthropic, so presumably he knows about opt ins/outs, etc.
> I have reason to believe OpenAI doesn't respect training opt outs, but there is a good chance they let something get through without an opt-out too.
I believe that, at this point in time, OpenAI's reputation speaks for itself. The stakes for success are already enormous, and the CEO has been repeatedly described by those around him as a pathological liar.
People who choose to expose anything remotely sensitive can surely be expected to know the risks of doing so.
>there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Over time I have come to trust Costco’s curation. Their standards seem high, and there are definitely products and brands that they sell that I don’t like, but those are subjective tastes vs objective low quality in my experience. I don’t buy everything there, but I take note of the brands and products that they either keep for a long time or dump quickly.
Quality vs variety trade off. Costco only has a couple options but they are well better and you don't have to do extra work to make sure you're not buying a piece of crap.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.
Not just gut flora. High levels of circulating xylitol (and erythritol for that matter) have been shown in both mouse models and humans to be associated with increased platelet reactivity and elevated 3-year risk of major cardiovascular events.
But we're talking significant levels of xylitol/erythritol, such as from keto-friendly ice cream and drinks, not the modest levels from chewing gum, and the dental benefits are well established.
The mushroom smell isn't from either the substrate or respiration. That distinct odor is 1-octen-3-ol. Biochemists call it "mushroom alcohol." It's caused by enzymatic breakdown of their cell walls, and it thought to be related to signalling.
I doubt it would be strongly present here. The article says the mycelium are close to dormant.
You can actually purchase mushroom alcohol commercially as a food additive.
The claim in the article that saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) naturally produced the deep blue color in the butterfly example is not actually true, although it's a gorgeous effect.
These are genetically engineered variants of brewer's yeast designed to produce pigments.
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