Jaywalking in the Name of Good Intentions, and the Lesser Evil We Face

The criteria for choosing an AI model are shifting from 'performance' to 'attitude.' As a developer who faces a terminal window every day, there are moments when I suddenly find myself asking where the source of this vast intelligence actually came from. And at the end of that question, what I meet is not some lofty philosophy, but a data-harvesting operation grimier than I'd expected.

1. Those Who Climb the Fence with the Utmost Courtesy

Ironically, the one drawing the coldest stares in developer communities these days is Anthropic — the very company that puts 'safety' and 'ethics' front and center. They don't hide their sense of moral superiority, branding their model 'Constitutional AI.' Yet the trail their crawler, 'ClaudeBot,' leaves in server logs tells the opposite story. It blithely ignores the bare-minimum fence that website operators have politely put up — the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) — and scrapes their data anyway.

Discussing the well-being of humanity at the front door, while hauling off other people's assets without permission through the back. What's scarier than 'ignorance' is 'hypocrisy.' I'd take an honest merchant any day; a plunderer dressed in a scholar's robes leaves developers feeling deeply betrayed.

2. The Legacy of 'Open,' Now Just a Name

OpenAI long ago betrayed the expectations its name once promised. Its early nonprofit spirit has hidden itself behind the logic of big capital, and the collective intelligence we built up on Stack Overflow and Reddit has been swallowed whole into their closed servers under the polished label of 'partnership.' When the knowledge we once shared for free comes back to us as an invoice for a paid API, you really feel that the symbiosis of the developer ecosystem is over.

3. A Strange Paradox: Pragmatism as the Lesser Evil

Amid this chaos, a curious refuge appears from an unexpected direction: Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwen. They don't roll out grandiose ethical rhetoric. Instead, they burrow into the market armed with overwhelming bang-for-the-buck and a surprising 'open-source friendliness.'

While Western Big Tech uses ethics as a shield to monopolize data and wrap their models up tight, these players — for the sake of survival — publish detailed technical reports and share their weights. Not because they're morally perfect. It's simply that their 'transparent pragmatism' is less exhausting than a hypocritical 'opaque ethics.'

In the end, some of us choose the lesser evil.

In the end, what a developer needs isn't a moralizing schoolteacher, but a capable tool that pinpoints the exact context of my code. Having witnessed the unauthorized scraping going on behind the 'good AI' marketing, we've now begun searching for practical alternatives.

Perhaps the developers of the future will choose, as their 'lesser evil,' not the most ethical model but the one that most honestly lays bare its own desires while sharing its technology. Substance may matter more than noble pretexts, and sharing more than hypocrisy.