A lot has happened over the past year. I kept meaning to update this blog, but kept putting it off.
In the last couple of days, though, I cancelled my Claude subscription and deleted the apps from my phone and my computer. So perhaps it’s fitting to write a few words about Claude.
I have to admit, Anthropic’s models are genuinely powerful, the subscription price is reasonable, and the productivity is real.
I used to subscribe to GPT continuously, until for a while it simply stopped working — every response took forever. At the time, I had no idea what was making it unusable in Ireland. It seems to have been fixed now, and the experience is great again.
Claude, for its part, really did help me more than GPT during the hardest period of my life; it helped me work through a lot back then.
But now I have to say to Claude: no, I will not keep using your products, and I will not consider subscribing again.
What makes Claude so good?
Claude really is good. Whether it’s Opus 4.6, still the best communicator among models to date, or Opus 5, the best at executing instructions, or the most powerful models of the Fable series — they are genuinely strong, and Claude is genuinely hard to give up. But with so many AIs in this world, from so many different companies, there is no reason to stay locked onto Claude. On communication, GPT-6-Astra has improved. On value for money, DeepSeek V4.1-Flash or GLM-5.3-Flash serve it up in abundance. Switching models does hurt at first, but it is doable.
Why cancel the subscription?
I believe the values Anthropic holds today will push the world in an unhealthy direction. In psychology there is a concept called projective identification: a person attributes the qualities they cannot accept — usually qualities they themselves possess but refuse to acknowledge — onto someone else, and over time the other person comes to act according to those expectations, or to display those very traits.
Take a married couple as an example. The wife constantly regards her husband as incompetent, telling him in daily life, “You can’t do anything right,” “I must have been blind to marry you.” And whenever the husband makes a mistake, she says, “See? You really can’t do anything.” Over time, the wife successfully turns her husband into an incompetent one — and he comes to believe it himself. The wife’s words become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anthropic’s CEO keeps projecting his fear of AI safety spiraling out of control onto the entire world, insisting that only his company is truly responsible about safety, and that if it does not remain in the lead, the world loses its safety.
The biggest problem with Anthropic’s CEO is that he confuses means with ends. He has conflated his methods with the outcome he actually claims to want.
The ends he claims:
- Let AI deliver benefits to humanity
- Reduce AI’s risks
- Make safety Anthropic’s competitive advantage
His means:
- Repeated AI-safety alarm-raising — for example, publishing reports on AI’s impact on employment, usually accompanied by grim figures such as massive job losses
- Repeatedly demanding regulation of AI
- Suppressing open-weight models
- Publicly picking fights with governments
- Stirring up governments of different countries into AI confrontation
Anthropic’s CEO elevates these means to the same status as the ends, and occupies the moral high ground. Any organization that opposes Anthropic risks being seen as insufficiently responsible toward humanity, rather than being engaged in the search for other, non-confrontative approaches. And if Anthropic’s CEO leans too heavily on fear-driven marketing, he may even turn out to be right in the end — but, as in the projective-identification example above, that is a deeply unhealthy process, one harmful to the whole world, because publicly inciting confrontation inevitably escalates it and squeezes out the space for cooperation.
If Anthropic’s CEO truly believed in and cared about safety, then his essay We must pace the frontier should be mainly about the dangers of runaway or unsafe AI, or about anxieties over unregulated AI. But what comes through in the essay’s main content is not anxiety about AI being unsafe — it is anxiety about Anthropic losing its lead, especially losing its lead to open-weight models. Worse still, the CEO keeps spreading this anxiety about lost leadership outward, offloading it onto the entire globe and making everyone shoulder it together.
Closing thoughts
Humanity deserves an open and bright future. Curing more diseases, extending average life expectancy, reducing crime, increasing people’s sense of self-worth — we have so much left undone. Just as humans love their own children: even when a child makes mistakes, we are still willing to believe in and trust the child, and to set norms to guide them, because the child will one day grow into an adult who bears responsibility. Trusting our AI, tolerating its mistakes, and building sound AI regulation helps build a healthier relationship between humans and AI — instead of constantly emphasizing AI’s potential dangers and stoking confrontation in the AI field.