Better business for a specific company doesn't mean better markets for consumers and other participants, and we make laws to ensure the latter even if it's at the expense of the former.
> "These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution."
[...]
> "The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee."
[...]
> "In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats."
This is bonkers, I can't believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers' dealings with users.
The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple. The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device. Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia in them.
Of course, Xcode and the SDK overall aren't paid for by users, so Apple can charge devs for it, but so far there's no way to signal to Apple that you have opted out of using their SDK and have the fee waived. Not that it would be enough anyway, since even having to interact with Apple in any capacity to be an iOS dev is the main problem.
> The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device.
That argument would assume no cost for upgrades.
I remember having to buy new operating systems.
That said, looking at the state of recent OS upgrades, I think I'd have been happy if the only changes over the last, oh, decade or so, had been purely security updates. But these too are not free.
> Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia in them.
Yes, obviously they want to make as much money as possible, and this is at odds with consumer interests.
That said, I have the impression that for many users, the benefit is the app ecosystem, while for many developers the benefit is the users. Endless marketing cycles of new-shiny-API for one, and new-shiny-UI for the other.
That said, power-law distribution, so "the app ecosystem" is probably mostly Meta, Google, Amazon, as specific names, then becoming somewhat vague with "whatever work mandated of Slack or MS teams", "their bank", "three or four supermarkets", and "a taxi firm who may or may not be Uber".
>Yes, obviously they want to make as much money as possible, and this is at odds with consumer interests.
It's not at odds with consumer interests at all. It's at odds with developer interests.
It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
Developers might prefer to shift the burden to consumers's wallets instead of their own, but overall this model is beneficial for everyone involved. It is also better for the environment because directly making money from developers incentivizes them to support old hardware for as long as possible.
> because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
> Developers might prefer to shift the burden to consumers's wallets
I vigorously disagree with this. It sounds very confused about economics, specifically prices.
Apple, as every market actor does, charges the absolute maximum price the market will bear for their products and not a penny less. They cannot "make up" any money that comes from unrelated parties (such as their Google payola for search, or their casino games for children IAP revenue) by raising product prices. If they could raise their product prices and have that be profit-positive, they would have done it yesterday.
They could raise prices on phones to make up for a hypothetical "free iCloud+," because the same consumers are the other party in both those transactions so presumably many people would see that the more expensive phone justifies free iCloud services.
Apple doesn't set its prices by saying "OK, we need exactly 83 billion dollars in net income this year, so given that our products cost us 233 billion dollars to make and we have 54 billion dollars in expenses, we need 383 billion in revenue, so now let's set prices of each product to target this."
That $83 billion in net income is just the number they are able to make last year with the prices being what the market would bear. Trying to increase prices to hold it there when a downfall in other revenue happens would depress sales.
>Apple, as every market actor does, charges the absolute maximum price the market will bear for their products and not a penny less.
That price is much lower than it otherwise would be if the only revenue Apple could generate came from hardware. The opposite incentive exists today, where it actually benefits Apple to sell cheaper razors to make more money from the razor blades.
> It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
iPhone sales pay for the entirety of Apple's R&D. 10 times over.
That's just not how that works, how much consumers will pay is a binding constraint. Apple isn't subsiding their phone with developer fees and distributing their below marginal cost. Apple is almost certainly charging well above its marginal costs and is already charging the revenue maximising price, it's not willingly leaving money on the table.
Not entirely how you've made formed this connection but respectively it sounds like you've confused several things here.
They are obviously not charging the maximum price because they’ve raised the price significantly when the iPhone X came out and suffered no harm. Apple sets prices based on a 30% raw profit margin and ignores the market except as it constrains their raw material and manufacturing costs. They use that 30% to pay there other costs, such as iOS development and R&D and investing in manufacturing partners.
The iPhone X, like all models, is a different model than all the others; the maximum price for one model is not going to be the maximum price for another.
> Apple sets prices based on a 30% raw profit margin and ignores the market except as it constrains their raw material and manufacturing costs.
Literally impossible ahead of time, as some of their costs are fixed rather than marginal. If you spend, as they did last year, ~$34.5bn on R&D, and you make a thing that costs $1000 to make and then you price it at $1300, but the market looks at what it is and what it costs and says "nah" so only 1 million people buy it that year, then what you're actually making isn't a 30% profit, it is a loss >110x your revenue.
We don't know exactly how much R&D was spent on the AVP, nor the exact sales, but the market reaction to the price is something you should have in mind. No matter what its unit economics were, Apple probably made a loss overall.
I'm kinda tempted to do that to classic MacOS. But only kinda, because copyright and trademarks are things, and I don't want to risk incurring the wrath of any legal team, let alone a trillion dollar corporation's legal team.
I wonder if they already use LLMs in development. However, and maybe I'm misremembering, but they were doing clean room development so it may not even be possible (because of copyrighted stuff leaking through LLMs).
The total cost of supporting the hardware via the OS is easily baked in to the exorbitant hardware cost, or failing that, could easily be baked in.
And you can tell this is the case because they do eventually drop support for old phones. Its not like they give you forever security updates because you buy apps.
yeah, I think for as much as many of us hold out hope that the EU will break the back of these brazen monopolists, there's a limit to their friendliness to the actual interests of consumer freedom when it's got to be balanced by their love of censorship.
Do you mean “censorship by the EU” or “censorship within the EU”, or both? Because I see a lot of the latter, and I don’t find it inconsequential at all.
We don't have a lot of "censorship within the EU", some russian propaganda tv channels might be blocked (as they should) but that's about it really. Now if you mean in a particular EU member, that's different but it's not impacting the whole EU.
By the EU and in Germany, really... What is censored in other member states isn't in the news, but for all I know it's also not much and not important.
The whole EU censorship rhetoric is almost always devoid of facts and examples. I feel like it is mainly sustained because US people like the narrative that theytl are the free(TM).
Asking innocent questions often works better than confrontation, but yeah, this elevated importance of utmost free speech doesn't survive the Atlantic crossing and can be used to maliciously pooh-pooh Europe to an American audience.
Wait, which apps are you referring to having been delisted by EU (which branch? what process?), as opposed to "breaching app store terms and conditions" (which the companies do of their own initiative all the time)
Do you have any more sympathetic examples that aren't enemy propagandists? I feel getting banned from the app store is getting off lightly compared to, say, Julius Streicher.
is like much of the discourse around the changes, overly sensationalized and borderline false.
The only change made that's relevant to sideloading-a-downloaded-APK as far I understand, is a 24hour delay in enabling the ability to do so, which is a wildly overblown non-issue.
It’s a one time delay that occurs when you first enable the ability to install downloaded apks and you never see it again for any device attached to your Google account. That’s why I called it a wildly overblown non-issue
> In a statement, a Commission spokesperson welcomed Apple’s changes to its business terms, which it said “follow a close dialogue between the Commission and Apple”.
> “Following today’s announcement, the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new terms,” it added.
There's nothing on the commission webpage, all I could find is the above comments from a spokesperson which aren't hugely definitive.
I think we can take the mention of dialogue to mean the commission thinks the new rules are a step forward enough that wider civil society can have a look and maybe kick up a stink, and the absence of press release coordinated with Apple as evidence the procedure is still open
> [“The Commission welcomes the changes made by Apple to its commercial terms,” commented a spokesperson for the European Commission. This announcement, the spokesperson continues, is “the result of close dialogue between the Commission and Apple,” after the tech giant was found in April 2025 to have breached the rules of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and ordered to take the necessary corrective measures. In light of these developments and the changes to be introduced, “the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new conditions.”](https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/08/18/tracking-and-new-commerc...)
The first third party iPhone apps existed before the SDK existed. iPhone OS was jailbroken pretty quickly and apps emerged fast. SDKs are nice references and tools but the're not the only way to skin a cat.
This is not a useful distinction. The API existed and was used by Apple apps and by jailbreak apps. In fact Scott Forstall intentionally prepared iOS to have third-party apps. The API was just not public yet.
If you think the header files are the thing that Apple thinks is worth of a cut of app revenue, I think you're way off base. It's the technology, whether you access it with permission or not.
The app revenue cut is because you partner with Apple to deliver a solution to something in a users life with them. Apple sees themselves as critical to an app’s ability to exist at all. Its like nintendo taking a cut of a nintendo game. You cant have one without the other. A lot of people disagree that the iphone is a one of a kind consumer product like this. To many its just a computer and software is independent. I see both sides
Right, and my point is that the technology is already fully paid for by the user. By "the SDK" I meant the dev environment stuff, not the API base on the phone.
> Right, and my point is that the technology is already fully paid for by the user.
That's your claim. Neither Apple nor the EU appear to agree. Nor do US courts appear to agree in the Epic v. Apple trial.
Apple itself has to pay license fees for some technologies in iPhone, and those licenses do not automatically extend to third-party developers via the consumer. It's not a license agreement with the consumer.
When you said, "there's no way to signal to Apple that you have opted out of using their SDK and have the fee waived", which fee did you mean exactly? The quote in your comment refers to the Core Technology Commission, which is a percentage of app revenue. There's also the $99 developer program fee, which all App Store developers pay.
I know that some developers are annoyed by the $99 fee, but for professional iOS developers, $99 is a drop in the bucket, and the revenue % cut is the vastly larger and more important thing. So if by "the SDK" you mean only the header files and such, that seems like mostly a red herring to me, and if you were allowed to use the technology for free, then there wouldn't be much reason for Apple to charge for the SDK. And indeed, Xcode has always been available for free. https://apps.apple.com/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12
> That's your claim. Neither Apple nor the EU appear to agree. Nor do US courts appear to agree in the Epic v. Apple trial.
This point was never raised in any of those cases. Apple just did aome hand-waving "IP compensation" justification and everyone just went along with it, because the case wasn't about that particular point.
> Apple itself has to pay license fees for some technologies in iPhone
And such costs are more than made up for by hardware sales. The only reason this persists is because of greed, not because it's essential to profitability.
> and those licenses do not automatically extend to third-party developers via the consumer. It's not a license agreement with the consumer.
They don't need to extend them because the consumer is already entitled to use those technologies merely by having purchased the device. That entitlement comes from the fact that they get legal copies of the technologies when they take posession of the hardware. IP rights regulate distribution, not consumption.
As for the rest of your comment, the overall problem is the requiremet to deal with Apple at all, the $99 fee and the 5% commission are just the cherry on top.
> This point was never raised in any of those cases. Apple just did aome hand-waving "IP compensation" justification and everyone just went along with it, because the case wasn't about that particular point.
I strongly disagree with your interpretation. IP compensation was essential in both of these cases, and everyone went along with it because they didn't dispute Apple's rights.
> IP rights regulate distribution, not consumption.
It's all about distribution.
A consumer can download Xcode, build their own app, install the app on their own device, and use Apple API, all for free. What they can't do is distribute that app to other consumers.
The developer tools are relatively unimportant, which is why Apple gives them away. Distribution is everything.
> As for the rest of your comment, the overall problem is the requiremet to deal with Apple at all, the $99 fee and the 5% commission are just the cherry on top.
This doesn't answer my question. I asked which fee needed to be waived. There is no fee to get Xcode, so there's nothing to be waived by opting out.
> A consumer can download Xcode, build their own app, install the app on their own device, and use Apple API, all for free. What they can't do is distribute that app to other consumers.
I was referring to the distribution of the licensed technologies by Apple to the hardware purchasers. Returning to your own interpretation though, the hypothetical community SDK wouldn't contain proprietary code, so the distribution aspect is solved there. It's the same principle by which homebrew game console scenes work, or how you can build Windows software on Linux without touching any Microsoft code.
> This doesn't answer my question. I asked which fee needed to be waived. There is no fee to get Xcode, so there's nothing to be waived by opting out.
The waiver scenario is meant in the context of Apple using the 5% and $99 fees as payment for the maintenance/R&D of the official dev experience. The fees would be waived because the dev isn't making any use of those tools in a hypothetical FOSS SDK.
> I was referring to the distribution of the licensed technologies by Apple to the hardware purchasers.
I know. My point was that distribution of the licensed technology by Apple to iPhone purchasers does not thereby allow third-party iPhone app developers to distribute their iPhone app executables to other iPhone purchasers.
> Returning to your own interpretation though, the hypothetical community SDK wouldn't contain proprietary code, so the distribution aspect is solved there. It's the same principle by which homebrew game console scenes work, or how you can build Windows software on Linux without touching any Microsoft code.
You appear to be focused on the building of iPhone apps. I'm focused on the distribution of built iPhone apps. This is why I said, "The developer tools are relatively unimportant, which is why Apple gives them away. Distribution is everything."
In general, consumers are unwilling or unable to build their own apps. They need precompiled executables, distributed by third parties, to easily install on their devices. The hypothetical FOSS SDK is a red herring. I don't see how the consumer's right to use the iPhone automatically grants a legal right for third-party developers to distribute executables using Apple's licensed technology. There are other consumer products that allow personal use but don't allow redistribution.
> I don't see how the consumer's right to use the iPhone automatically grants a legal right for third-party developers to distribute executables using Apple's licensed technology.
Because calling APIs is not a "use" of the technology that IP laws would cover. Having a binary call a proprietary API but not actually containing the underlying technology that makes that API possible is not a derivative work. The technology is already inside the iPhone, the apps just call it in a very specific way, and since IP laws only regulate distribution of the technology itself, the third-party developer isn't doing anything illegal.
Suppose that a developer discovers a bug in the Apple Music API that allows songs to be played without paying for the Apple Music subscription. Are you claiming that if a developer writes an app to exploit this bug, they're not doing anything illegal? It's ok to get Apple Music without paying, as long as you're just "calling an API"?
In any case, you're still ignoring distribution. You start with the assumption that a binary is already on the iPhone. The technology is already inside the iPhone, but the third-party app is not. Distribution is an entirely different legal matter than personal use. Are you claiming that it's illegal for Apple to control and prevent distribution of third-party apps? If so, I challenge you to file a lawsuit.
> Suppose that a developer discovers a bug in the Apple Music API that allows songs to be played without paying for the Apple Music subscription. Are you claiming that if a developer writes an app to exploit this bug, they're not doing anything illegal? It's ok to get Apple Music without paying, as long as you're just "calling an API"?
That would be illegal, yes, but for an entirely different reason (DRM bypass to get copyrighted material), not because it's calling an existing API. It's not the case for 99% of apps.
> In any case, you're still ignoring distribution. You start with the assumption that a binary is already on the iPhone. The technology is already inside the iPhone, but the third-party app is not. Distribution is an entirely different legal matter than personal use.
The third-party app does not contain any Apple-owned or licensed technology just because it's programmed to make use of it once inside a phone, and there's no IP right to control distribution of material that uses proprietary technology if that technology is not actually in the distributed material. The only barrier is Apple's own actions in how they programmed iOS to reject unsigned code and their developer program, not a legal one based on IP.
My point is this: you can charge for API use. You can set terms and conditions for API use. You can charge some API users and allow others free usage. That's up to the API vendor.
I simply don't accept your dubious claim that one person's legal API usage automatically allows that one person to subcontract API usage to another, i.e., a third-party developer. And I'd guess that your experience as a lawyer is about as extensive as your experience as an iOS developer.
The individual instance of API functionality is owned by the user, even if the intellectual property itself is owned by Apple. What makes the user's API usage legal is the fact that they own the device and the individual iOS copy inside, not the fact that Apple allows personal use. The EULA is superfluous, an iDevice purchaser is inherently entitled to make use of the iOS functionality merely by posessing the device.
Apple can charge for API use in the sense that they physically can, not in the sense that the law only allows that arrangement.
The law does not forbid people from developing unauthorized accessories to products, full stop. It only protects IP from being redistributed.
The hook that allows Apple to charge for API usage by developers is a technical one, not a legal one.
And there's no need to go for the ad-hominems that you have been going for since the beginning. Why such hostility?
> the technology is already fully paid for by the user
This seems like a very large and unfounded assumption on your part, particularly in a world where we no longer pay for Apple operating systems or their updates.
I talked about SDKs not APIs. No one thinks iPhoneOS was created without the ability to support apps, Steve Jobs' comment about web-only apps being the future is known bs. I also didn't say anything about revenue.
One does not need an SDK to use an API. One does not need an SDK to develop software. It's a helpful tool, usually helpful documentation, tips, examples, etc. But none of it is required to build applications.
My comment was ONLY addressing that SDKs aren't required to develop software. Nothing else at all. And in that I am most certainly not off base.
Nowadays with LLMs people could probably patch up some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality without infringing Apple's copyrights. If the DMA was enforced correctly this would have already happened.
I assume you mean on an open hardware platform, because underneath Apple's SDKs are just more Apple APIs until you get to Apple's IPC interfaces to talk to Apple-designed hardware register interfaces.
Unfortunately when it comes to technology licensing, it is rarely successful to say you should pay less because you purposely made your job harder.
> Nowadays with LLMs people could probably patch up some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality without infringing Apple's copyrights.
I don't intend to insult you, but as an iOS developer myself I have serious doubts about whether you have any expertise in the subject you're talking about here.
I didn't mean to imply that this would be a vibe-coded slop project. I'm no LLM evangelizer and hate the hype train as much as any competent dev. The truth is though that LLMs are uniquely suited for work of this kind, and a team that knows what they're doing could make short work of the whole thing much faster.
I'm not going to argue with you, because I continue to suspect that you have no iOS development experience and are just making hand-wavy claims with no empirical basis.
I asked a question: "How do you not use their SDK?"
Your answer seemed nonsensical to me.
What I meant, though, is that I'm not going to argue about a specific point, the viability of "some FOSS SDK that perfectly replicates the original's functionality." If you don't even have any experience with iOS development, then you have no basis for making any claims about that subject, and thus I'm not going to bother explaining "What would be so outlandish about that?"
In any case, most iOS devs don't want to opt out of using the SDK. That would not be a particularly attractive route for making iOS apps. What I want as an iOS dev is the same freedom of software distribution that we have on macOS.
> If you don't even have any experience with iOS development, then you have no basis for making any claims about that subject, and thus I'm not going to bother explaining "What would be so outlandish about that?"
The basis for my claims about the subject is my knowledge of computing and development in general. I dipped my toes into iOS dev a few times and there's nothing that seemed to set it apart from any other SDK situation beyond Apple's restrictions, at least nothing that would make my claim outlandish.
That is never going to happen. We will never get the same freedom we enjoy on pc's again for the simple fact it benefits both the platform owners and governments to have a simple centralize company in this case (Apple & Google) to go to get what they want. The freedom we have on pc's is too much of a wild west and not enough control that both governments and platform owners like. As much as we may want to it will never happen for those reasons.
But as the API surface expands, making a compatible competitor becomes increasingly difficult. Look at how long WINE has been developed and how it still isn’t done.
But I don't want to make replacement API? I'm just expecting these API to be freely available on any OS, you can't seriously say that you will charge for these. It's not an "SDK" but basic OS primitives.
I doubt Apple can even ship a mobile phone without audio or I/O support even without third party apps...
> Apple retains ultimate control over app developers' dealings with users.
The app developers can offer their own line of devices on the market. Users are free to choose a different manufacturer. Apple doesn't hold anybody in chains, it is people and developers who are coming to them.
Or should people to restaurants and demand to be allowed to order food delivery from other places to their tables, and bring their own drinks? Honestly, I think that most hackers and EU bureaucrats think that it would be a splendid idea.
> Or should people to restaurants and demand to be allowed to order food delivery from other places to their tables, and bring their own drinks?
A restaurant is private property, you're just a customer in someone else's turf. An iPhone (and the individual iOS copy inside it that provides the advertised functionality) is the intellectual property of Apple, but also the private property of the user, and it is the traditional property ownership status that determines who gets to interact with the functionality. Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.
An iPhone is the private property of the user, and if you are skilled enough you can jailbreak it and there is nothing Apple can do about it. If you're not skilled to do it, then that's your own problem. No court of law would go against you if you took a soldering iron and your expertise to change your iPhone in any way you please. Apple shouldn't be obliged to help you in those efforts, though.
> Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.
Who was forced to buy an iPhone? Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?
> An iPhone is the private property of the user, and if you are skilled enough you can jailbreak it and there is nothing Apple can do about it. If you're not skilled to do it, then that's your own problem.
No, because Apple chooses to prevent me from controlling the device the way I want. The skill involved is about finding holes in the system, not in enabling an "expert mode" or something.
The imbalance of power is itself a problem. A hardware manufacturer should be legally prohibited from designing their devices in such a way that they retain more control over them post-sale than the actual owner. Device ownership should mean maximum control over code execution.
> Who was forced to buy an iPhone?
Nobody, but I'm not a free market absolutist.
> Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?
Every developer who wants to cater to ~half of the mobile user population (~85% if it's young Americans)
I assume an expert mode (where you can sideload anything you want) is what you are asking for. To that I raise the standard objection: how do you protect grandma from having a criminal social-engineer her into enabling expert mode and then having her sideload malware onto her device?
I mean if you're gonna stop people from owning their device and doing what they want with it just because of the possibility of crime occurring then their are quite a few more things that probably should also no longer exist because of their potential use in crime.
That's a pretty ridiculous argument if you ask me.
You can say that about a lot of things in life. Legalized gambling, for example. Tons of people ruin their lives with it and this creates big externalities for society. But we tolerate it so that everyone has the freedom to gamble.
Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves. I think a lot of people have short memories for all the hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago. I think we also need to remember that Apple is not the government so people have alternatives to buying their devices.
Personally, I think people should have the right to buy a locked down device. It’s not on Apple to provide open competitors to their product. And why should developers have a right to develop for the platform? Heck, I wanted the iPhone back when it didn’t even have 3rd party apps at all.
> Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves
The idea that, for many people purchasing an iPhone, the inability to install apps from alternative stores or the web is a selling point seems rather questionable.
On top of that this could easily be provided by an optional switch that enables you to enforce this on your own device if you so desire.
It is a poor reason to request that all app distribution for everyone else also has to go through Apple and its terms, basically for your convenience.
I’ve already given one reason why the switch is a bad idea. Another reason is that powerful third parties such as Meta and Google could force users to disable their own protections and give those apps full access to all data as a condition of installation.
Ultimately, an option becomes a requirement and then the protection for users is totally gone.
>>hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago
And that still plagues every computing platform now. Including Apple platforms. So the lockdown clearly didn’t completely solve that problem like a lot of people seem to claim
That is exactly what Apple has decided to do. You have named the tradeoff. Stop the possibility by disabling everyone. It has always been this way. People have had nearly 20 years to leave Apple
> No, because Apple chooses to prevent me from controlling the device the way I want.
They have no power to prevent you from doing anything you want to your device. Just like Ford has no power to stop me from modifying my truck in any way I want. Or any other product from any other company.
Not helping you is something different, that's not preventing.
> Every developer who wants to cater to ~half of the mobile user population (~85% if it's young Americans)
That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.
> They have no power to prevent you from doing anything you want to your device. Just like Ford has no power to stop me from modifying my truck in any way I want. Or any other product from any other company.
They have the technical ability to prevent me from running the code I want, and they exercise that ability for that purpose. They're not a passive actor in this situation, they explicitly block me from doing things that they themselves can do, even after the sale.
Again, this should be a concern merely because of the power imbalance.
> That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.
Not the same thing at all. The mobile app market is a top-level one in a way the Coca-Cola one is not. Apple is controlling a huge amount of commerce for products that have nothing to do with them, besides being digital accessories to iDevices.
The better analogy would be: there are only two store companies in the entire US. If you want to sell any product at all, of any category (silverware, food, lawnmowers etc) you must contract with them and there's no other way, and anyone who wants to purchase any product whatsoever only has those two options.
> which unfair market conditions made it impossible
Bank applications depending on various os or device level security features? Good luck getting developers to build applications for your platform in general until you have a very large number of users (even Microsoft couldn’t manage it when the oligopoly was way less entrenched)
Well then you aren't forced to purchase an iPhone, are you? Much less forced to develop for an iPhone. If a developer isn't satisfied with having access to billions of Android customers, then they should change careers or stop complaining.
Developers also had every opportunity in the world to offer their software for Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices. Or offer their own devices with their software. Which is an easy thing for banks to do. Their laziness and incompetence isn't an excuse for them to turn around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.
> with having access to billions of Android customers
The average Android user is almost worthless economically compared to the average iPhone user. If you calculate the market share based on revenue and not total users Apple has a much bigger proportion of the pie than the raw user base would suggest.
> Which is an easy thing for banks to do.
The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.
Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly, the government’s job is to make sure that markets are competitive.
> around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.
To get into the position where you can abuse your position in the market you have to do something right, certainly. That doesn’t mean you should be allowed to do that in perpetuity.
> The average Android user is almost worthless economically compared to the average iPhone user.
But how and why is Apple to be blamed for that?
> The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.
The culprits are the banks, who aren't offering their customers adequate service. The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.
> Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly
Some of the biggest companies in the world are competing against each other on smart phones. And customers have a great variety of devices to choose from. Smart phones is a prime example on where the free market worked: Fierce competition between several very large companies resulted in amazing devices being offered to customers. And since customers are free to choose what they purchase, they will choose the best device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable. Companies who cannot offer good enough products fall away from the competition by the nature of the free market: Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Siemens, and more. All of them were powerful corporations.
Current hacker ideology has mixed the worst parts of capitalism and communism into weird standpoints which make no sense. Am I supposed to feel sorry that developers (they are mostly giant corporations) can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? And that therefore the government should intervene to guarantee the profits of these giant corporations?
Enough, already. Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition. Let them have their win, and if they are acting against the interest of their consumers, then they won't have their win for long.
It’s not about blame, the point of anti trust and competition laws is just that, maximize competition and consumer surplus. Yes that inherently penalizes the most successful companies we collectively as a society judged that to be a fair bargain.
> The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.
Sure, it’s easier to go after Apple not banks, though.
> have a great variety of devices to choose from
Physical hardware sure. Effectively there is no choice when it comes to software though.
> device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable
Sure, but again physical hardware is not whats being discussed here. All major device manufacturers make it either were hard or impossible to install alternative operating systems (especially that got much worse for Android devices over the years).
> can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? A
When it comes to certain sectors that’s true. Or rather you are supposed to pay a very significant proportion of your revenue as rent to Apple to for very little in return (Apple benefits almost as much from third party developers as developers do from Apple).
> Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition
Yeah, that how most monopolies work. They are just outright better than their competition until they are in a dominant position and can get a higher proportion of the pie because they ran all the competitors out of business. That’s exactly when regulators should intervene to make the market more efficient.
Based on empirical evidence free/efficient markets can almost never exist without regulation.
So if you were forced to keep f.e. a door lock on your house (that you bought), because as part of the purchase the developer required it - would you be fine with it too? You could technically jail break it...
A much more accurate nonsensical analogy would be getting take out but only being allowed to eat it with Apple branded utensils because otherwise your food would catch fire.
> Users are free to choose a different manufacturer
It’s an oligopoly, so no, consumers are not exactly free to do what they want. If the market were truly competitive you might have a point.
Apathetic mass-murder is unjustifiable, and the ultrarich would need to justify it to their families, who would then need to justify it to other people they know, and so on. And remember that we're talking about the majority of the global population, an event like that couldn't be hand-waved away like one would do for a minority group.
Iran just mass murdered their protesters earlier this year, and they needed to convince humans to pull the trigger. It didn't seem to be that hard for them to justify.
It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it.
I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind.
Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.
Not comparable at all. The Iranian protesters are/were a minority group within a country that itself makes up 1.1% of humanity.
I'm talking about morality here, not practical ability. The ultrarich have their circle of friends and family, who themselves have their own social circle, on and on until suddenly you're not looking at wealthy people anymore. Six degrees of separation and all that. How many people in the social graph can know about this extermination plan before the whole thing collapses?
Why would they take action to exterminate anyone, when they can simply ignore them and let them live and die in extreme poverty, unable to participate in the economy? The west already accepts this kind of poverty with the sweatshop workers, and nobody bats an eye.
It's just disenfranchisement. Only the people who try to use violence to replace the political leverage they lose when they lose economic leverage would need any action taken against them, and that's easy to justify as self defense.
Because 7.5 billion people with nothing to lose would quickly turn chaotic and mass-murdery. 90% of humanity in idle poverty is impossible to justify, at least today they do something of value that can be used as a retort by the morally unscrupulous. A black-and-white situation where a few get everything, most get nothing and do nothing for anybody else is beyond justifying, so the self-defense argument wouldn't work.
It's already been here for much of the 20th century, and everyone seems to have just accepted it. We're just going to have Europe and America join sub-saharan Africa.
The moral justification for the existence of poverty is one of purpose and worth through contribution to society. The family member of an ultrarich baron can sleep at night mostly due to the idea that those who are rich contribute value to humanity as a whole, ergo those who are poor simply aren't working hard enough or contributing in a meaningful way ("just world fallacy" etc)
When AGI becomes reality, that reasoning disappears. When everyone's worthless, no one is. Thus the scenario you speculate about would need everyone in the upper echelons of society to be consciously, openly sadistic power-hungry people, which is not the case even when taking into account the higher dark triad rates among them.
The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model.
Anthropic is especially guilty of this. They have been using such language for a while, like when they analyze model weights for mechanistic interpretability and call it the model's "biology".
> The former, because it's anthropomorphizing a model.
Not really. The input and output is already natural language. That is already "anthropomorphizing".
That is, if this is the bar for anthropomorphization its already happened.
Telling the model to "believe in itself" is just stochastic manipulation that has shown enough reliability to be a recipe to make it keep going.
It's only actually anthropomorphizing if you forget it's a trick and think it's a real person.
There is nothing distasteful about it. If people get confused that's on them. They wouldn't be very useful if you couldn't just talk to them. That's kind of the whole point. Otherwise you can just go back to coding by hand. Telling it to believe itself is just input that happens to work. This probably tells us more about human nature than you realize given the corpus on which it is trained. It obviously doesn't mean anyone actually thinks it's a person.
It's obvious that you don't get it but I will try my best to explain why so at least you can form an idea about how others feel.
It's about what makes humans unique. The LLM does not experience reality, it just merely pretends it does, and even that, it does in a shitty way. I think disgusting is a very adequate adjective. The reason why it is disgusting is because you are devaluing a divine experience to the realm of the common and the vulgar, a cheap substitute being valued as equal (or even on the same scale) as the most important experience we could go through.
To give you an example that might land in a more familiar context, think of that one guy who takes his plastic doll everywhere and pretends it's his wife and gets upset when others don't acknowledge "her" as a person.
Who said that it did? The comment you're replying to literally states "It's only actually anthropomorphizing if you forget it's a trick and think it's a real person".
Telling it to believe in itself is no more pretending than telling it anything else in natural language. Why are you speaking to it at all if it's not a person? Why write in higher level languages even? It's just a machine let's all go back and code in 1s and 0s.
No one is calling it a person except mental health patients and straw man detractors.
The biology example was even weaker. Saying it has a "biology" is about as distasteful as the term "neural net" or calling an input device a "mouse". Is it animal abuse to click on something all day? Language is inherently anthropomorphizing.
No one is calling it human. The fact you are so easily threatened is far more suggestive of your own poverty of understanding of not only the machine, but yourself. If humans are so special the threat posed by this should be self evidently non existent.
Is it though? There's a perfectly "technical" reason why this strategy should work, without any sort of anthropomorphising:
Assume models are trained on vast amounts of data. Assume that the model is asked to solve something that the literature says it's impossible. It will start generating tokens towards that "this is a famous conjecture, it's not possible to prove it, blah blah". Assume the model was also trained on books/novels/etc. Assume the model was also also trained on "solving" many math problems. Now, you can make an argument that just placing "you can do it" in the context will "steer" the model towards generating "moving forward" tokens. Take ideas, generate tokens, go towards negative. "You can do it". Model starts generating tokens again, more ideas, more "exploration". More negativity. "I believe in you keep going". The two (book tropes + math CoT) mix together in the context. The model keeps on "pushing" and "vibing" between the two. Ta dah, it works.
> "Anthropic believes that they are the ones who should have final say over how Anthropic is used; given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone."
To be fair, we're simultaneously mocking anthropic for believing in safety so much and also for them thinking they're the only ones that care enough about it. It's true that no one else seems to care as much. Judging by reactions from everyone, all their safety talk is very bad PR.
The criticism isn't that they believe in safety too much. It's that they patently using safety as a red herring with the actual goal of regulating away competition that they know the cannot beat.
The people involved have been talking about safety long before they had any users or a company.
"Concrete Problems in AI Safety" by Dario and another founder was published 2016, anthropic was founded 2021. Among a bunch of other examples, including other founders.
If safety is seen as a joke now, it was really seen as a joke back then. The reason they keep shooting themselves in the foot with bad PR is because they truly believe in risks.
I’m sorry, but this do-gooder concept doesn’t jibe with their other actions. For example, swindling their business partners (such as Figma). Filing an unnecessary trademark lawsuit against a customer whose brand predates Anthropic.
And for safety? Oh yeah, they literally sell the removal of guardrails in exchange for minimum spend commitments.
For example, swindling their business partners (such as Figma). Filing an unnecessary trademark lawsuit against a customer whose brand predates Anthropic.
Completely unrelated to AI safety.
they literally sell the removal of guardrails in exchange for minimum spend commitments
It seems blindingly obvious to me that you'd want to let trusted organizations use the models defensively, which means without guardrails, and that you'd probably gate that behind some kind of enterprise sales process, for multiple reasons.
Honestly, it just seems like you have an axe to grind and aren't really particularly knowledgeable (or curious) about AI safety.
1. This is not “unrelated to AI safety”. The things they seek in the name of AI safety always seem to be aligned with the path that will eliminate competition and give them maximum economic power. Thus, to disentangle what is sincere and what is ulterior, we have to look at the leadership’s character holistically. A ruthlessly unethical and cutthroat corporation that is also seeking unprecedented power doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when it claims to be doing this for altruistic reasons.
2. You misstated what I wrote. My gripe is not that they have an enterprise sales process. It’s that in negotiations, they say “we’ll drop the safeguards if you agree to spend more”. I haven’t heard of any groundbreaking AI safety research concluding that spending more with Anthropic makes the models safer, but maybe Dario has a new blog post coming.
When someone says they are doing something to help you, but it really helps them, you have to choose if you trust what they say. One way to know if you can trust them is to watch how they behave.
(By the way, I have been very transparent on HN that I have an axe to grind, literally referring to it as “an axe to grind”. My axe is that I think the frontier labs are a symptom of a cancer on our society, and I personally wish to see them and their tactics fail.)
Yes, that’s obvious, and it’s leading you to some really specious logic.
Your simpler version still sidesteps the point that a trademark dispute has nothing to do with AI safety. Other than that you disagree with it, therefore they’re dishonest scammers, therefore AI safety is all bullshit?
A trademark dispute in isolation isn’t related. But as part of a broader course of conduct in which the pursuit of commercial advantage consistently trumps other values, it is. We can disagree on this.
What they believe now or care about is fundamentally not very relevant: allowing them a monopoly would be a big mistake. Google was supposed to do no evil and it probably started that way but nothing guarantees the future other than having alternatives.
Hosting and providing Chinese models wouldn't be the same as doing business with the sanctioned entities though, you don't interact with them in any capacity if you only use the weights and don't sign any contracts.
So they get posted to hugging-piratebay-faces.ru or whatever by a mysterious Twitter account. 100% totally above board companies won't touch it, but the number of companies that wouldn't exist were it not for hacked copies of Microsoft office and Photoshop and shared logins would surprise you.
Trade secrets are easy to claim but hard to turn into a tort without having someone steal them. I'm sure some lawyer can come up with a filing that tries to make distillation an act of theft, but there would be many weak links in that chain.
Contrast this with Apple's case where it looks like they've got evidence of people walking out of the building with various physical artifacts on their way to an OpenAI interview.
Also, more seriously, there are plenty of pieces of information that are compelled to be published that don't lose their confidentiality. There actually is a general concept that confidentiality can be lost if you are negligent in its protection but it's a very nuanced thing.
Even if the weights are just made through traditional training and no AI is used to make the weights... is there a copyright right? If the weights are a numerical derivation that aren't made by a human is there even human expression? Absent human expression, there is no copyright right?
The output being created by a machine is not automatically disqualifying. e.g. PCM audio data is all created by a machine, but that doesn't prevent CDs from being copyrighted... because the input to it was highly human-created.
Ultimately it all hinges on the specifics of the training and how much human involvement was involved throughout the creation process. I suspect arguing this successfully in favor of upholding a copyright would be an uphill battle for many situations, but ultimately we'll need more court cases to know for sure.
That could effectively be the case here but your statement in isolation is an oversimplification of recent legal guidance on this matter -- AI generated things are copyrightable if there is sufficient human authorship involved in the generation process.
The copyright office's recent statement on this matter were sensationalized when they really said nothing groundbreaking at all -- this was always the standard applied when any tools are used in creating a work.
Priviledge escalation from a non admistrative user, best way I could describe it is type confusion, writing values in a kernelmode structure with an api that was not designed for it. For example instead of writing window data, you write priviledge data.
Just one example: PII of third parties is frequently attached in evidence supporting motions. In theory, careful redaction should be done, but it isn't, and those third parties aren't around to assert their privacy interests.
So wealthy people can go ahead and violate your privacy interests, but not really anyone else? I’m sorry, but this is a bad answer to the problem. The solution is to fix the redaction process, not to go with some awkward indirect solution that creates its own set of problems WITHOUT solving the original stated problem.
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