You cannot search for bugs or vulnerabilities in "a company's product before they've sold it to you", because you cannot access it.

Obviously, I was not talking about using pirated copies, which I had classified as illegal activities in my comment, so what you said has nothing to do with what I said.

"A company's policies and terms of use" have become more and more frequently abusive and this is possible only because nowadays too many people have become willing to accept such terms, even when they are themselves hurt by these terms, which ensures that no alternative can appear to the abusive companies.

I am among those who continue to not accept mean and stupid terms forced by various companies, which is why I do not have an Anthropic subscription.

> "if you don't want to give your ID to get a bank account, don't"

I do not see any relevance of your example for our discussion, because there are good reasons for a bank to know the identity of a customer.

On the other hand there are abusive banks, whose behavior must not be accepted. For instance, a couple of decades ago I have closed all my accounts in one of the banks that I was using, because they had changed their online banking system and after the "upgrade" it worked only with Internet Explorer.

I do not accept that a bank may impose conditions on their customers about what kinds of products of any nature they must buy or use, e.g. that they must buy MS Windows in order to access the services of the bank.

More recently, I closed my accounts in another bank, because they discontinued their Web-based online banking and they have replaced that with a smartphone application. That would have been perfectly OK, except that they refused to provide the app for downloading, so that I could install it, but they provided the app only in the online Google store, which I cannot access because I do not have a Google account.

A bank does not have any right to condition their services on entering in a contractual relationship with a third party, like Google. Moreover, this is especially revolting when that third party is from a country that is neither that of the bank nor that of the customer, like Google.

These are examples of bad bank behavior, not that with demanding an ID.

Your examples have nothing to do with Anthropic and the like.

A gun does not have other purposes than being used as a weapon, so it is normal for the use of such weapons to be regulated.

On the other hand it is not acceptable to regulate like weapons the tools that are required for other activities, for instance kitchen knives or many chemicals, like acids and alkalis, which are useful for various purposes and which in the past could be bought freely for centuries, without that ever causing any serious problems.

LLMs are not weapons, they are tools. Any tools can be used in a bad or dangerous way, including as weapons, but that is not a reason good enough to justify restrictions in their use, because such restrictions have much more bad consequences than good consequences.

> Unsure where you got the "younger people" from.

Like I have said, none of the people that I know from my generation have ever found acceptable the kinds of terms and conditions that are imposed nowadays by most big companies for using their products or their attempts to transition their customers from owning products to renting products.

The people who are now in their forties are a generation after me, so most of them are already much more compliant with these corporate demands, which affects me and the other people who still refuse to comply, because the companies can afford to not offer alternatives when they have enough docile customers.