Intent in Motion

A product — especially its source code — is a point-in-time snapshot of intent in motion. It’s not the thing. It’s the residue of decisions already drifting from where the organization is heading next week.

For everyone who thinks they’ve got something special because they replicated it: you’ve caught a glimpse of an artifact that’s already stale. Your tomorrow has already diverged from theirs, if you hoped to usurp or leverage it. The value was never in the artifact. It was in the people, the culture, and the momentum that produced it. I shipped dozens of products over nearly two decades running a consultancy. The code from most of them is long gone. What mattered was what we understood about the problem and how we worked together to solve it.

I’ve been thinking about this distinction a lot lately. Because Anthropic — a company I’ve admired, invested in, and built significant parts of my practice around — just showed me which side of it they actually stand on.

The First Crack

The terms of service for their subscription plans were what first made me uncomfortable. Use our tool, or you don’t get to play with our models. Bundling model access to a specific product feels less like an invitation and more like a lock-in play. When did “come build with us” become “build with our tool or not at all”?

It’s the move companies make when they stop trusting the value of what they produce and start relying on leverage instead.

I noticed it. I filed it away. Benefit of the doubt.

Lawyers First, Community Never

Then came the source code leak. And whatever you think about the leak itself, the response was clarifying.

DMCA takedowns — broad, aggressive, indiscriminate. Everything and anything that ever touched the leaked code. Not a conversation with the developer community. Not a frank acknowledgment that mistakes happen and here’s how we’re handling it. Just attorneys.

Anthropic has been talking to its community through lawyers for long enough now that it’s no longer a temporary posture. It is the posture. When your reflex after an internal mistake is to send attorneys instead of humans, you’re revealing something. You’re saying the artifact matters more than the relationship. The source code matters more than the people who use it, extend it, and build their livelihoods around it.

I’ve seen what the other choice looks like. When a local newspaper published hateful propaganda against our LGBTQ community, our team at PFLAG didn’t send lawyers. We organized. We showed up — 150 people packed a city council meeting that normally draws 30. We responded with openness, not control. It was terrifying, and it worked, because the community’s trust is harder to rebuild than any artifact. Organizations that reach for control instead? They usually get exactly what they’re asking for: compliance without loyalty. Users without advocates.

The Dissonance That Hurts

Anthropic positioned itself as a company building toward a world where generating code is easy, accessible, nearly free. Where the bottleneck moves from production to intent. Where the real value lives in the humans who know what to build and why. I believed them. I’ve been developing training materials on agentic development practices, helping teams understand how to work in this new paradigm. I built my recent work on the assumption that this vision was genuine.

And then they demonstrated, through their own actions, that they don’t believe it about their own code.

If you truly believe that code generation is commoditized and the moat is culture and intent, then a leaked codebase is an inconvenience. You shrug. You move faster. You trust that your people and your direction are what competitors can’t replicate — because the snapshot is already stale.

But if you DMCA everything in sight and communicate through cease-and-desist letters? You’re telling us the code is the moat. You’re acting as if the artifact is the thing that matters.

Do you believe what you say you believe?

What Stress Reveals

What organizations protect when things go wrong tells you more than any keynote or blog post. Not what they say they value — what they actually reach for when the pressure hits. What do you grab first, your community or your lawyers?

Anthropic reached for the artifact. They protected the code. Not the community, not the relationship, not the trust of the people who have been building on and evangelizing their platform. The code.

And think about the engineers who write that code every day. People who are proud of what they’ve built, who believe in the problems they’re trying to solve — alignment, safety, making this technology work for humanity. A leak could have been a moment for them. An opportunity to stand in front of the community and say: here’s what we’re building, here’s why it matters, here’s the kind of company we’re trying to be. Instead, the lawyers spoke for them. The artifact got protected. The people who made it — and the story they could have told — got silenced along with everything else.

I’m not naive about the pressures — boards, investors, legal counsel advising rational self-interest. I understand the machinery. But rational isn’t the same as aligned with your stated values. And when the gap between rhetoric and action gets wide enough, the people who believed the rhetoric notice first.

I am ashamed to be an Anthropic subscriber right now. Not because they had a leak — mistakes happen. Because of what the response revealed about what they actually value. The snapshot of intent they’ve shown us is pointing somewhere I don’t want to follow.