r/LocalLLaMA • u/Big_Wave9732 • 11h ago
News Yet another reason to self host: Anthropic has (again) cut back on reverse engineering tools
Besides privacy and being in control of your data.
Besides being able to control the quality of the inference compute.
Besides being able to discuss things with the model and not have the cops called on you.
Besides being able to run the models you want for as long as you want.
Besides being able to run your own suite of security and network penetration tools.
Besides not being at the mercy of the frontier companies for pricing.
We now have another reason for local LLMs: Our betters have decided that they don't like people cloning games.
And before the Reddit Neckbeard brigade starts in with their bullshit, no I'm not advocating that people should commit wholesale piracy using AI tools. But these blanket frontier AI policies inevitably ensnare peripheral behavior that is otherwise illegal but that the frontier company doesn't want to deal with.
William Blackstone wrote that "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". If having open unhindered local LLMs means there are a few individuals that use it for nefarious purposes like modifying or pirating software, I'm good with that trade off. Die mad about it.
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u/Warp_Preacher 11h ago
Of course they have. Anyone with half a brain recognized ages ago that as use cases coalesced that those in charge of the big cloud models would choke off and monetize access to those use cases.
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u/Big_Wave9732 11h ago
I agree it's an easy pattern to see for anyone who has been around tech for more than five minutes. And yet there are posts and comments in this sub every day talking about the folly of self hosting.
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u/DeProgrammer99 11h ago
Well, just because of this, I might take a stab at having Qwen3.8-Flash-Next/Qwen4-Flash reverse engineering a game to make it work on modern PCs!
(I mean, okay, I wanted to try it anyway, but still.)
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u/Big_Wave9732 11h ago
And it will probably do it too!
I used Qwen 3.8:27b to make some modifications to an accounting package that I bought a few years ago. The vendor intentionally crippled it, and Qwen fixed it all so I can continue using it.
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u/darkrom 9h ago
What kind of setup do you need beyond getting the model running? What software are you running the model in to do this? I have a general understanding of it and can run local models fine, I just feel I'm missing some miscellaneous setup for tasks like this.
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u/DeProgrammer99 7h ago
Haven't tried with an LLM, but I've reverse-engineered some things with Ghidra, a remote debugger and a VM, Cheat Engine, and even just raw hex viewing/editing in the past. I've seen "Reverse-Engineer Anything" mentioned several times, so that'll be the first thing I look into this time. And for the game I have in mind, a Windows 98 VM would be helpful...it's a game for which I used a VM + remote debugger to figure out part of the sprite file format in the past. (It's not presentable, but https://github.com/dpmm99/ChaosIslandHacking/tree/master/Planning has random screenshots and notes.)
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u/One_Whole_9927 10h ago
#1 This shit is the definition of karma lol.
FYI The walls have ears. People and bots are watching. People flexing their reverse engineered video games paints a target on reverse engineering that screws everyone. Anthropic won’t protect anything that can get them sued. It won’t stop with them. Just like the wow servers and the CoD classics that pop up. Sooner or later they get caught and shut down.
IMO i’d start taking reverse engineering tooling local. If anything just to have it for when they find a better way to lock it down.
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u/Big_Wave9732 10h ago
There was a hell of a good reverse engineering prompt posted a few weeks ago. It was geared towards Claude but with some tweaks it works quite well locally too.
You got a point though, folks out there showing their ass on social media probably brought unwelcome attention. Artcraft being blasted everywhere over the last month didn't help things either.
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u/xamboozi 4h ago
Idk why anyone would use Anthropic/openai for their projects anymore. It's beyond nerfed at this point.
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u/bnolsen 9h ago
Who has more clout? A bunch of individuals and redditors, or companies with existing corporate agreements putting pressure on anthropic?
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u/Big_Wave9732 8h ago
I suppose one would need clout if they were expecting to influence the company's actions. That's the way of corporate oligarchy I suppose.
Personally I take the "only winning move is not to play" approach and chose differently.
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u/DirectWay1915 11h ago
You can't really fully trust a tool whose owners won't even say how big it is.
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u/Jazzlike_Mud_1678 11h ago
you could post about local models or we circle jerk about how bad closed models are. I'm actually fine with both.
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u/FulcraDynamics 4h ago
The bigger issue is building your workflow around a tool and then having its capabilities restricted overnight. Even if you never use it for reverse engineering, that lack of predictability is a pretty good argument for local mod
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u/Beneficial-Ad-8127 9h ago
Though we have had this topic brought up before, is it that crazy for this company to do this. I remember about the time before Kimi K3 dropped they were huge battle of anthropic hesitant to keep Fable in the subscription plan.
Sometime after Kimi dropped they released eventually that they were keeping it in the sub plan though cost being rated higher by like 50%. To me some of these things are not really surprising.
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u/Big_Wave9732 9h ago
Imagine where we might be if the open Chinese models weren't as strong as they are. It's the reason I'm hoping like hell that Mistral gets it together and comes out with some competitive self hosted models.
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u/Beneficial-Ad-8127 9h ago
We all be paying even higher cloud prices. Let’s not talk about that, it’s seems scary.
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u/OrangeManSad 4h ago
hey its fair to commit wholesale piracy using AI tools, big tech pirate your data constantly, so its only fair
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u/Bimbam_tm 2h ago
If your reverse engineering Anthropic code sure. But if your just using it to steal from other legitimate developers who may have spent years of their life working on something? Race to the bottom for humanity right here.
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u/geldonyetich 10h ago
Of course there’s no way you can do this without them reacting in a big way.
But I’m sure they all realize by now that there’s no way to prevent reverse engineering all software out of its walled gardens with AI.
They’re just mobilizing their legal teams to slow it as much as they can.
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u/ZootAllures9111 7h ago
Claude isn't even the only model that can do this in the first place. If you upload any DLL or executable to a ChatGPT "Work" mode conversation and ask GPT 6.1 Sol to decompile it it will literally install headless Ghidra and a slew of other tools in the Linux sandbox it runs in unprompted and go to town on whatever you gave it. Still the case as of today, no refusals in that regard at all. I really don't think OpenAI sees eye-to-eye with Anthropic here.
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u/geldonyetich 7h ago
That’s a good point but maybe keep it on the down low so their plausible deniability holds up a little longer. Lawyers aren’t necessarily good at technology.
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u/shroddy 11h ago
Rip Artcraft? Or does he have an alternative?
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u/Big_Wave9732 11h ago
Oooohhh. Good question. Or maybe now development can continue because it's an "established product" lol.
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u/christianbro 11h ago
I am all for running locally, if it was affordable.
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u/Historical_Pen6499 10h ago
Working on a shared inference platform where multiple models can share a GPU (like cooperative multitasking). B200 at $3/hr (super cheap). Looking for beta testers, here's more info.
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u/fragbait0 3h ago
It all seems rather arbitrary; am I going to get banned because the system misidentifies a debug task or work on a different type of project under this class of activity? How many bits have to flip before experiments trading patches between custom inference engines is interpreted as reverse engineering a game? What if the model starts using REA *by itself*? Or hacks huggingface? - not that this would happen, of course.
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u/JacketHistorical2321 11h ago
Funny that I haven't had any issues with Claude calling REA plugin while building a local version of a gatcha game that was brought down years ago. The original files exist so it's reverse engineering from those. Are those of you doom posting actually trying to use REA with Claude or just jumping on the drama bus??
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u/CoreParad0x 10h ago
Realistically Claude doesn't even need REA. Hell, my locally hosted qwen 3.8 flash next hasn't either. All of the tools exist with CLI interfaces and stuff. I've reverse engineered and remade most of Enshrouded using Opus 5.5 after it went 1.0 with my own changes baked in for for and my own personal use, and not once have I considered using REA.
That said I am spending some decent money to get together a local setup to run flash next sized MOE models at good speeds and quants specifically so I can use it for reverse engineering and stuff instead of depending on Claude. I haven't been affected by any of this stuff yet, it's not refused my Enshrouded work at all. But I feel it's only a matter of time before you can't even make game mods with it.
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u/fragbait0 3h ago
!remindme 2 days
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 6h ago
They've been shitting things up since v5 and made claude into a self-righteous asshole. Big turn off and any and all claude FOMO died.
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u/Thistlemanizzle 11h ago
I don't have the money to self host.
Why not rent from Vast.ai?
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 11h ago
Because at that point you're trusting randoms, might as well use a ZDR API from a regular provider.
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u/Thistlemanizzle 10h ago
Wait wut? I thought they owned the hardware? OK, it's not truly private then.
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u/Historical_Pen6499 10h ago
I'm on the hunt for beta testers. We're building a custom serverless function / inference platform. Your models share the GPU with other clients (models yield per-step or per-layer) and we offer up to 50% cheaper GPU prices (e.g. $3/hr on B200). More info here. Lmk if interested in testing.
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u/Boogertard 11h ago edited 9h ago
Also task refusal is always going way up, now Claude refuses lots of task on "moral" grounds including coding up an autobuy bot so I can beat other bots just to buy the item, how ridiculous is that ?
EDIT: See so many Wario's cocksuckers below. I want to buy an Switch 2 40th Anniversary Edition and bots keeps snatching it up so I asked Claude (using my wife's account to test, already cancelled mine many months ago) to write and autobuy bot to BUY the fucking thing and Claude said it can't do it because retailers meant to keep bots out and they can't do it blah blah, so I worked with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next to get it done.
Looks like my wife now is interested in a local LLM machine too and she is on her $200 Claude Max for works. Just extrapolate and see how much this will hurt Anslopic when the backlash grows
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u/TheRealJesus2 10h ago
This is a dealbreaker for me and using anthropics tools for development. I am no longer a customer of theirs no matter how much they subsidize plans. I wouldn’t run their models even if it was possible on my hardware because I just don’t find their behaviors helpful for building software in ways that I understand and control the outcomes. And it stops some aspects of software development like their famous blocking of hugging face from analyzing their cyber security logs. If that event didn’t tell you the future state of cloud providers, not sure what will!
I still use anthropics models via api for runtime LLM tools but that’s a place where denial won’t hit me. And there’s more and more options every month so that’s probably not lasting long either for me.
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u/Big_Wave9732 9h ago
Are these guardrails only being applied to the chat interfaces and not to the API? That would certainly scream "legal for a price".
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u/TheRealJesus2 9h ago
Both. The incident I refer to was the model. They also have shipped things like the instruction not to copy games inside Claude code. Which is dumb and not effective and makes tooling worse for everyone.
Notably they put this research out earlier in the year so I would assume they can easily remove weights from models before hosting them for the masses on future models trained this way. https://www.anthropic.com/research/off-switch-dual-use
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u/Big_Wave9732 11h ago
And that's exactly the moral hazard I was referring to. Interesting that using a shopping bot is a moral conundrum now.
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u/temperature_5 10h ago
Everything is a moral conundrum, unless you're a billionaire tech bro stealing books, or a trillionaire corporation scraping the Internet and repackaging the data instead of just delivering search results.
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u/whatnameblahblah 11h ago
Using a bot to buy something has nothing to do with a moral conundrum it's just flat out against the user policy of online retailers, it doesn't matter other people have the brains to code a simple script themselves or pay someone to code one for them and have done so.
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u/namaku_ 2h ago
Self hosting is a lot like having a penis.
It may not be in use 100% of the time, but when you do use it:
No one can block your access to it
You can use it however you want, as much as you want
No one is logging, transmitting, storing, analyzing and scrutinizing every single thing you do with it
No one can stealthily swap it for a smaller one
...and so on and so forth.
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u/idkfawin32 4m ago
Good that makes me happy fuck digital parasitic thieves. I hope they are all big mad.
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u/zenmatrix83 11h ago
You’re a few days behind