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Claude was the nice guy of AI – what changed?

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20.05.2026

Wednesday 20 May 2026 5:24 am  |  Updated:  Tuesday 19 May 2026 12:32 pm

Claude was the nice guy of AI – what changed?

By: Alys Denby and Lewis Z Liu

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 16: In this illustration, the Claude AI app is seen in the app store on a phone on February 16, 2026 in New York City. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, the Defense Department used Anthropic's Claude Ai, via its Palantir contract, to help with the attack on Venezuela and capture former President Nicolás Maduro. (Photo illustration by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The narrative around Anthropic’s Claude, initially perceived as the “ethical AI company,” has recently shifted due to concerns over perceived hypocrisy, aggressive ambition, model degradation, platform restrictions, and vendor lock-in risk, causing customers and developers to seek alternatives, says Lewis Liu

Working title: Claude Was the Intellectual Nice Guy of AI. Then Something Shifted

“You really feel like Claude is a real person that you are interacting with in the Bay,” my brother said to me over a Cantonese noodle dinner in the SoMa district of San Francisco last week. We are both AI founders. My brother, Samuel, Co-Founder & CEO of Fergana Labs, which is building shared-memory workspaces for AI agents, is ten years younger than me and has a strong pulse on the zeitgeist of the Bay Area.

I was reflecting on this just as the narrative around Anthropic suddenly shifted over the past week. If OpenAI were an American high school character, it would be the star quarterback: popular, known by everyone, brash, speaking only in confident tones and expecting the world to bend to his will. Anthropic, by contrast, would be the intellectual old-money kid heading to Harvard, a bit bookish, a bit wordy, but deeply intelligent, capable and seemingly caring.

Over the last couple of weeks, however, that polished façade around Anthropic seems to be cracking. For a while, Anthropic appeared on course to become........

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