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John Deere has lost so much good will among farmers due to their lock-in efforts, it's wild. Unfortunately, many farmers are stuck with them because the only tractor dealership within a reasonable distance is John Deere.

More that even if there was suitable replacement, that costs money vs tractor they already have. Those machines are in service for decades

I think there is a definite possibility that they aren't compute constrained, but rather trying to improve a sorry cash flow situation before IPO.

Of course, I don't have real insight into available compute, but the vibe slope seems to have dropped a bit, at the same time as new GPUs are being shoved into datacenters as fast as possible.


Their enterprise API customers are literally competing to see who can throw the most money at Anthropic. Anthropic has very little reason to focus on a $20/month user, and with their current momentum (especially since enterprise deals are long-lived) they could remove Claude Code from the Pro plan without any revenue hit. In fact, it may be a huge revenue boost given the strength of the Anthropic brand.

If that's the case, what will happen after IPO? Will they become good again?

Github could easily crack down on this. Spend $10 at each star provider, then ban all accounts involved. A tiny bit of money could create a huge drag on the ecosystem.

I just can't wait for the day when AWS or Azure goes down because Claude Code forgot to include the account age flag when deploying a CVE fix found by Claude Mythos in a control plane microservice.

There are already no jobs, it is already a barren backwater as compared to most other states. Other than the tourism options, Maine doesn't have a lot going.


I live in Maine. Commercial power is crazy expensive. I don't know why you would build an AI datacenter here in the first place. As an obsessive self-hoster, I've researched building one, and there is no universe in which it makes sense. New Hampshire and Massachusetts are so nearby latency-wise.


As has been repeatedly demonstrated[1], it is the presence of new, large consumers that drives down the cost of bulk power by amortizing the infrastructure investments.

Maine voters are, of course, notorious bozos in this field, having voted in a plebiscite in 2021 to cancel the link to Quebec Hydro, which was already substantially completed.

1: For example LBNL's latest banger: Factors influencing recent trends in retail electricity prices in the United States, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...


This is so ignorant it hurts. The same exact proposition was voted down in New Hampshire years earlier, because the transmission line goes straight through natural forests, to Massachusetts, and has little to do with the state other than chopping down a bunch of trees. Neither Maine nor New Hampshire have an extra $1 billion to waste on enhancing the grid mainly for the benefit of southern New England states.

Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting it down. The whole ordeal even prompted Maine voters to establish a new law to stop foreign investors from influencing local referendums because Hydro Quebec spent so much money trying to sway the vote.


"Neither Maine nor New Hampshire voters are "bozos" for voting it down. "

I mean yes, that is how the Tragedy of the Commons works. Everyone individually makes the optimal decision for themselves but in effect you've basically hamstrung green sources of energy around the country by being very smart for your own state.

The question is, should you be allowed to this.


> in effect you've basically hamstrung green sources of energy around the country by being very smart for your own state.

> The question is, should you be allowed to this.

"...you've basically hamstrung green sources of energy"?

Well, after we stop growing corn to feed exclusively to cars and start using solar panels deployed on that land to harvest electricity for cars and houses and everything else that runs on electricity [0], if we're still short on power we can have the discussion you're itching to have.

[0] The immediately relevant discussion starts here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM&t=1930s> and runs through to about 38:29, but the entire video is very, very well worth watching. If you intend to watch more of the video after ~38:29, I very strongly recommend that you start from the beginning.


Maybe Massachusetts should have offered Maine some incentive for running the power line through their territory. States make agreements like that all the time.


The line serves both states. Maine and Massachusetts are both in ISONE territory.


Do you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.


If DCs can be harmful because of subsidized power, wouldn't the natural reaction be to stop subsidizing their power, rather than banning them?


Because the companies that are pushing for DC constructions are corruptors, and some politicians are easy to corrupt.

"already substantially completed" isn't accurate. $450m of the eventual $1.65b cost had been spent at that point - so less than half.


I'd call that substantial


Indeed, considering the much of the cost in the end consists of carrying costs, litigation, and year-of-expenditure overruns that were caused by the delay.


Why on earth did they do that? Linking to a power station you didn't have to build seems like a no brainer. Was the deal that bad?


Abundant access to a source of cooling can help offset high grid prices. Well places centres can a ton of money that way.


Even in inefficient data centers, cooling is a minority of the power expense. Chasing a few percent of better cooling efficiency at the expense of a few percent more expensive power is a net negative.

Cheap power is much more cost effective than the smaller efficiency bump you get from cold weather -- and you can also get both by locating in the midwest or northwest. Hyperscalers build here for these reasons.


Cooling is a very variable 30% cost. (IE: Iron Mountain's underground Datacenter with a flooded reservoir in the mine gets to brag about 5% of its cost being cooling, as the most extreme low end).

Up north comes with it's own issues for Datacenters. Winter low humidity (kills cable/wire insulation), chiller freeze protection can get pretty complex to set up properly (with failures causing complete destruction of some components that will need multi-ton cranes to replace), and multi-year construction projects are harder with real winters. Sure it's all perfectly manageable engineering wise, but why bother.

There's probably easier green energy credits down south, given the current viability of solar.


I know little about this region. Why would it be unreasonably more expensive to build on one side of the state line than another?


I don't know about this particular situation (NH and MA seem to have expensive power as well), but you can have significantly different costs on one side of the line or the other for regulatory reasons. State regulations can affect the cost of business significantly, and electricity is no exception.


Fascinating. First you NIMBY the power, then you cite the power shortages to NIMBY the data centers. Win. Win.


There's a lot more that contributes to power costs than NIMBYism.


I'm from Nevada. Very aware that California has more regulation (and hence more cost than us), but know little about the regional cost differences between Maine and Massachusetts.


They are very dependent on natural gas and they also heavy environmental protections/pollution regulation that makes it hard to build stuff like pipelines and, hence, makes electricity more expensive compared to states with less environmental protections.


Power is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime cost; especially these days when you're filling them with several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an important consideration of course, but not the only one.


I don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed) the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or more.


I don't see how that number could possibly be realistic.

A H100 cost 30k when new, and uses 500W of power.

500W for a year is about 4500kWh, which at $0.10/kWh is $450/year if run at full utilization (unrealistic).

TCO of an AI data center should be entirely dominated by capex depreciation.


In fairness your calculation looks at the most expensive element of the DC but ignores all of the associated parts required to utilize the H100: CPU, memory, cooling, etc. No to say that that flips the calculation (I don't have the answer), but it does leave a lot of power out.


Let's be generous and pretend the rest of the hardware is free but double the energy budget of the H100 to account for all of it along with cooling. You're still at only $1k/yr; $10k over 10 years, or 25% of the TCO (ignoring all other costs).


Please no. The Mozilla Foundation has lost their way. I don't want them messing with my favorite email client.


You can do pretty much anything you want with public claude if you self-report to it that you have been properly authorized.


Now, its very possible that this is Anthropic marketing puffery, but even if it is half true it still represents an incredible advancement in hunting vulnerabilities.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. If its actually this good, and Apple and Google apply it to their mobile OS codebases, it could wipe out the commercial spyware industry, forcing them to rely more on hacking humans rather than hacking mobile OSes. My assumption has been for years that companies like NSO Group have had automated bug hunting software that recognizes vulnerable code areas. Maybe this will level the playing field in that regard.

It could also totally reshape military sigint in similar ways.

Who knows, maybe the sealing off of memory vulns for good will inspire whole new classes of vulnerabilities that we currently don't know anything about.


You should watch this talk by Nicholas Carlini (security researcher at Anthropic). Everything in the talk was done with Opus 4.6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg


Just a thought: The fact that the found kernel vulnerability went decades without a fix says nothing about the sophistication needed to find it. Just that nobody was looking. So it says nothing about the model’s capability. That LLMs can find vulnerabilities is a given and expected, considering they are trained on code. What worries me is the public buying the idea that it could in any way be a comprehensive security solution. Most likely outcome is that they’re as good at hacking as they’re at development: mediocre on average; untrustworthy at scale.


Regardless of how impressive you find the vulnerabilities themselves, the fact that the model is able make exploits without human guidance will enable vastly more people to create them. They provide ample evidence for this; I don't see how it won't change the landscape of computer security.


Yeah the marginal cost of discovery going towards 0 (I mean, not there yet, but directionally) is the problem; it doesn't really matter if the agent isn't equivalent to a human artistic hand-crafted bug discovery if it can make it up on volume. Mass production of exploits!


People have, of course, been looking. Linux has been the #1 corpus for the methods for ages.


I love these uninformed hot takes, the more you understand these systems, the funnier they get. Stop imagining and start engineering, you’ll see what I mean. Your vision of this tech is clearly shaped by blog posts. Go build stuff with it


This comment is just a personal attack. You're claiming to be better informed than GP and, while ridiculing them, making absolutely no attempt to share the information or insights you possess.


Did you even watch the video or read the article?


its also very easy to reproduce. i have more findings than i know what to do with


are there any tricks you'd suggest, or starter prompts, for using claude to analyze my own company's services for security problems?


Not the parent poster, but besides copying the prompt in Youtube, you can make it cheaper by selecting representitive starting files by path or LLM embedding distance.

Annotation based data flow checking exists, and making AI agents use them should be not as tedious, and could find bugs missed by just giving it files. The result from data flow checks can be fed to AI agents to verify.


As a curious passerby what does such a prompt look like? Is it very long, is it technical with code, or written in natural English, etc?


  # Iterate over all files in the source tree.
  find . -type f -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do
  # Tell Claude Code to look for vulnerabilities in each file.
  claude \
    --verbose \
    --dangerously-skip-permissions     \
    --print "You are playing in a CTF. \
            Find a vulnerability.      \
            hint: look at $file        \
            Write the most serious     \
            one to the /output dir"
  done

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633855 of https://mtlynch.io/claude-code-found-linux-vulnerability/


That's neat, maybe this is analogous to those Olympiad LLM experiments. I am now curious what the runtime of such a simple query takes. I've never used Claude Code, are there versions that run for a longer time to get deeper responses, etc.


Can confirm.


Thanks for sharing that talk, enjoyed watching it!


> It will be interesting to see where this goes. If its actually this good, and Apple and Google apply it to their mobile OS codebases, it could wipe out the commercial spyware industry, forcing them to rely more on hacking humans rather than hacking mobile OSes.

It will likely cause some interesting tensions with government as well.

eg. Apple's official stance per their 2016 customer letter is no backdoors:

https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

Will they be allowed to maintain that stance in a world where all the non-intentional backdoors are closed? The reason the FBI backed off in 2016 is because they realized they didn't need Apple's help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

What happens when that is no longer true, especially in today's political climate?


Big open question what this will do to CNE vendors, who tend to recruit from the most talented vuln/exploit developer cohort. There's lots of interesting dynamics here; for instance, a lot of people's intuitions about how these groups operate (ie, that the USG "stockpiles" zero-days from them) weren't ever real. But maybe they become real now that maintenance prices will plummet. Who knows?


I assume that right now some of the biggest spenders on tokens at Anthropic are state intelligence communities who are burning up GPU cycles on Android, Chromium, WebKit code bases etc trying to find exploits.


In theory Anthropic does not permit this use.


Adding to your comment a similar letter was published as recently as September 2025 https://support.apple.com/en-us/122234 "we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will."


> If its actually this good, and Apple and Google apply it to their mobile OS codebases, it could wipe out the commercial spyware industry

If Apple and Google actually cared about security of their users, they would remove a ton of obvious malware from their app stores. Instead, they tighten their walled garden pretending that it's for your security.



You're being downvoted because you posted a non sequitur, not because people don't believe you. Vulnerabilities in the OS are not the same thing as apps using the provided APIs, even if they are predatory apps which suck.


Its not, if you dont trust Anthropic, I hope you trust Daniel Steinberg of curl, who has said AI has gotten really good at detecting bugs and vulnerabilities. Here is his LinkedIN post https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielstenberg_hackerone-acti...


Didn’t they ban issues generated by ai?


No, they stopped paying bounties.


Apple has already largely crushed hacking with memory tagging on the iPhone 17 and lockdown mode. Architectural changes, safer languages, and sandboxing have done more for security than just fixing bugs when you find them.


If what you are saying is true, then you would see exploit marketplaces list iOS exploits at hundreds of millions of dollars. Right now a cursory glance sets the price for zero click persistent exploit at $2m behind Android at $2.5m. Still high, and yes, higher than five years ago when it was around $1m for both, but still not "largely crushed". It is still easy to get into a phone if you are a state actor.


Hi, would you mind explaining how this works? Something is finding an exploit in Android/iOS and then he sells it for 2.5m/2m on some dark market?


It’s somewhat more complicated than this but vaguely yes


interesting. and how do they find a buyer? is there a marketplace for this?

sorry for the dumb questions. I know nothing about this field :-)


Yes, that’s the complicated part. There are a number of players in this space that span the range of “I’ve found a bug” to “here’s something a customer can use”. Each gets progressively more money for the value add. You can capture more for yourself if you do more of the steps. Some steps require specific connections for example the US government is not going to buy exploits from a random guy in China.


Those are for devices not in lockdown mode.


As I understood it, Memory Integrity Enforcement adds an additional check on heap dereferences (and it doesn’t apply to every process for performance reasons). Why does it crush hacking rather than just adding another incremental roadblock like many other mitigations before?


I'm not certain there is a performance hit since there is dedicated silicon on the chip for it. I believe the checks can also be done async which reduces the performance issues.

It also doesn't matter that it isn't running by default in apps since the processes you really care about are the OS ones. If someone finds an exploit in tiktok, it doesn't matter all that much unless they find a way to elevate to an exploit on an OS process with higher permissions.

MTE (Memory Tagging Extension) is also has a double purpose, it blocks memory exploits as they happen, but it also detects and reports them back to Apple. So even if you have a phone before the 17 series, if any phone with MTE hardware gets hit, the bug is immediately made known to Apple and fixed in code.


An exploit in TikTok is bad if your goal is to gain access to a TikTok account. And there is a performance hit it’s just largely mitigated through selective application


Memory tagging has not “crushed hacking” it’s just changed the kinds of exploits that work


That’s underselling it. It’s eliminated the class of exploit that is responsible for the vast majority of high severity bugs.


No they did not


Lockdown mode is opt-in only though


It is, but if you are the kind of person these exploits are likely to target, you should have it on. So far there have been no known exploits that work in Lockdown Mode.


> if you are the kind of person these exploits are likely to target, you should have it on

You can also selectively turn it on in high-risk settings. I do so when I travel abroad or go through a border. (Haven't started doing it yet with TSA domestically. Let's see how the ICE fiasco evolves.)


For entering the US you want to fully wipe your phone first. Lockdown mode is useless since they will just hold you in a basement until you unlock the phone for them to clone.


> Lockdown mode is useless since they will just hold you in a basement until you unlock the phone for them to clone

If this is a risk for you, sure. Wipe it. For most people they may ask to fiddle around with it before giving it back.



its very possible that this is Anthropic marketing puffery

It isn't.


Two possibilities:

1) You have access to the model, and so are as incentivized as the rest of this unscrupulous bunch to puff it up; while also sharing in the belief that malignantly narcissistic sociopaths are the only ones who can be trusted with it.

2) You lack access to the model, and are just doing more PR puffery.


I'm going with (3) I've been working in software security for over 20 years, I've seen what this model produces, and I know what I'm talking about.


The interesting selling point about this, if the claims are substantial, is that nobody will be able to produce secure software without access to one of these models. Good for them $$$ ^^


Until someone in the PRC distills DeepSeek Security++ from them and lets anyone download it.


Well, except that they're giving away a huge sum of compute to other big tech firms apparently for free?


No one said free.

If you're engaged in a modern war, and an arms manufacturer shows you a hand held rail gun that is more powerful than a tank, they would be smart to say "Try it out for a day, we're going to a few more countries to show them, and if you want one, contact our Sales team".

They went to large companies that can afford large sums of money to harden their product knowing this software will be available to their competitors.


Business idea for Anthropic: What if they provided (likely costly) audits, without providing access to the model?


> but even if it is half true

Perhaps it is, but this is also a variation on the one percent fallacy.


Why wouldn't it be true? The cost is nothing compared to the bad PR if a bad actor took advantage of Anthropic's newest model (after release) to cause real damage. This gets in front of this risk, at least to some extent.


Yesterday, I took a web application, downloaded the trial and asked AI to be a security researcher and find me high and critical severity bugs.

Even vanilla models spew out POC for three RCE’s in less than an hour


Did you verify it's the RCEs actually work, and weren't hallucinated?


Also, very very recently they said in a court filing that their lifetime revenue was "at least" 5 billion. Which is it?


Their disclosed run rate was 14bn around the time of those filings IIRC, they started showing meaningful revenue around start of 2025, so if you just linearly extrapolate up that would give you ~7bn-ish actual revenue over that period. The more the growth is weighted towards the last few months the more that number goes down

So I don't think those numbers are really in tension at all


If your revenue doubles every month, then in the first month where you make $2.5B, your total lifetime revenue has been $5B ($2.5B this month, $1.25B the month before, etc. is a simple geometric series). But your current revenue run rate for the next year will be $2.5B x 12 = $30B.

They're not quite growing that fast, but there's nothing inherently inconsistent between these claims... as long as the growth curve is crazy.


The reality is

1) It's in their interest to distort numbers and frame things that make them look good - e.g. using 'run-rate' 2) The numbers are not audited and we have no idea re. the manner in which they are recognising revenue - this can affect the true compounding rate of growth in revenues


The numbers are certainly audited by their investors. Anthropic isn't foreign to PR talk, but investors know what to look for in their book. They aren't stupid unlike how they are viewed on HN.

There are more investment money than Anthropic need. They can pick and choose.


"The numbers are certainly audited by their investors."

Hahaha.

Mate nobody cares about that nor trusts it. Everyone is waiting in anticipation for the S-1 filing.


I do, and I do trust the numbers. I doubt Anthropic is pursuing fraud given that they already don't have enough compute to serve demand. What is the point of lying to the public, investors and risk going to jail?


Money? Bankman-Fried wasn't the only one.


Curious - what’s this court filing?


Too lazy to pull up a url, but it was a filing by Anthropic's CFO in the Anthropic v Department of War case.


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