This decision is potentially fatal. You need symmetric capability to research and prevent attacks in the first place.

The opposite approach is 'merely' fraught.

They're in a bit of a bind here.

Are the real-time-blackhole lists still a thing?

If they're regularly allowing spam and not responding to reports in any sort of timely manner, possibly they should be reported to those.

Not going to work though, is it. Too big to fail shouldn't be a thing. It's not like you can't be flexible about it or give them some room to deal with it within corporate policy; but they do need to deal with it, right?

Realistically, I think some companies have outgrown the size where internet can still self-regulate them. You'd hurt yourself more than gmail.

This either needs laws or new game theory.

Or -you know- deprecate the current email system. I know that's a perennial proposal; but that's because every year it gets even more broken in even more interesting ways. It's patch-on-patch-on-patch at the moment. Just spinning up sendmail on a random box won't quite cut it anymore, if you want to participate.

Put this way: I sort of already trust Anthropic with some of my PII. And that's ... maybe not ok actually. But it's a single failure surface.

But that's definitely not the same thing as trusting Anthropic, AND Persona AND All Persona's partners AND their Partners ad infinitum.

And let's say Persona is actually ok; who knows, they might be? But it's still an extra surface; and if they share again, that's another extra surface again.

It's fairly common sense blast radius minimization. This is part of the actual theory behind GDPR.

"We already seem to accidentally be leaking some data through channel A" , doesn't mean it's a good idea to open channels B-Z as well. It means you might want to tighten down that channel A.

Does this analysis change if using on-site AI? What if the ToS is different? Is it possible to stand up a service that does get the protections required? This might also be interesting when dealing with trans-atlantic work.

Only way to know if your own criteria are now matched -or not yet- is to test it for yourself with your own benchmark or what have you.

And it does show a promising direction going forward: usable (to some) local models becoming efficient enough to run on consumer hardware.

[1] released mid-2025

[2] take with salt - only tests personal usability

+ Note that some benchmarks do show Qwen3.5-35B-A3B matching Sonnet 4.5 (released later last year); but I treat those with the same skepticism you do , clearly ;)

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is reported to perform slightly better than the model you mentioned.

It runs fine but non-optimal on a single 3090 with even 131072 tokens of context , and due to the hybrid attention architecture, the memory usage and compute scale rather less drastically than ctx^2. I've had friends with smaller cards still getting work out of it. Generation is at around 20 tokens/sec on that 3090 (without doing anything special yet) . You'll need enough DRAM to hold the bits of the model that don't fit. Nothing to write home about, but genuinely usable in a pinch or for tasks that don't need immediate interactivity.

It's the first local model that passes my personal kimbench usability benchmark at least. Just be aware that it is extremely verbose in thinking mode. Seems to be a qwen thing.

(edit: On rechecking my numbers; I now realize I can possibly optimize this a lot better)

Local models are chasing the online frontier models pretty hard.

So worst case, that's the fallback (FWIW, YMMV)

edit: Qwen-3.5 MoE (and other local MoE models like it)

I may consider showing my ID to a company I already have a business relationship with; given demonstrable legal obligations, contractual necessities, legitimate interests etc . Eg the standard GDPR list.

I do have an existing business relationship with Anthropic, so I might under some circumstances decide to show them my id. I don't have a business relationship with Persona though.

I understand the instinct: they want to insulate themselves from holding PII. Not the worst idea. I'm not happy with it being a third party though. Especially the third party in question.

Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial are both variants of Anthropocentrism, and share the same limitations. Have you considered other axes of thought?

I can readily admit that lots of humans will naively anthropomorphize horrendously, but I think that:

- The eliza effect is not what people think it is

- What is actually going on is obscured by all the anthropomorphizing

- But this is yet no grounds to throw out the underlying phenomenon, especially when a) it can be useful and/or b) it causes people to get hurt.

Definitely not exactly a human. OTOH Low hanging fruit is low.

Similar to the eliza effect, people still take the original reading of Clever Hans: "he couldn't really do maths, he's just taking social cues from his handler"

But what's the actual difference between Eliza, Clever Hans and RLHF? They're doing the similar things, right?

Now look at how we valued that in the 20th vs 21st century:

How much does an ALU even cost anymore? even a really good one? (it's almost never separate anymore, usually on the same silicon as the rest of the cpu/microcontroller)

Meanwhile... what's the TCO to deploy a sentiment classifier? Especially a really good one?

(this post directionality ok, but there's many a devil in the details)

Opus is also not the worst at hacking things either. Sometimes it hacks things 'by accident' you see. If Mythos is better at it, then at some point, yeah, I can see how that might start to become a problem. Especially running unsupervised.