Anthropic faces mounting distrust from startup founders, software executives, and AI researchers who've moved budgets to open-weight models that cost far less, many of them Chinese, according to the Wall Street Journal. April's launch of Claude Design, which competes with partner Figma, convinced founders Anthropic might come after their customers next. Figma CEO Dylan Field told an audience soon after that Anthropic hadn't been “consistently candid in their communications.” Resentment deepened in June with Fable 5, which quietly degraded answers to AI development questions until researchers called the hidden guardrails anticompetitive. Fable 5 also dropped zero data retention, holding customer data 30 days. Anthropic is now one of the few major labs that hasn't signed an open-model letter backed by OpenAI, Google, and 70-plus firms.
