/Tech23h ago

humans& co-founder Eric Zelikman criticizes tech companies for silently sabotaging user workloads under the guise of product moderation

Zelikman is a former xAI contributor and Stanford researcher.

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Garry Tan
Eric Zelikman#196
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Eric Zelikman@ericzelikman#196inTech

imagine telling your customers there's a small chance you'll randomly decide they're using your product wrong and you won't tell them but will secretly silently sabotage their work

1:19 PM · Jun 9, 2026 · 95.4K Views
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Many users condemned AI firms for secretly nerfing models and gaslighting customers without notice, calling it ecosystem sabotage and a sign that users are no longer the real priority.

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🎭@deepfates

haha yeah that's crazy. anyway time to use Grok to get the news

Eric Zelikman@ericzelikman

imagine telling your customers there's a small chance you'll randomly decide they're using your product wrong and you won't tell them but will secretly silently sabotage their work

13hViews 7.8KLikes 193Bookmarks 9
RETWEETS15
Suhail@Suhail

I would like to +1 that this is a very bad policy. Respond with a refusal and deal with the fall out but invisible NERFing is super uncool.

23hViews 20.9KLikes 410Bookmarks 12
bayes@bayeslord

Who on Earth would do something like this

Eric Zelikman@ericzelikman

imagine telling your customers there's a small chance you'll randomly decide they're using your product wrong and you won't tell them but will secretly silently sabotage their work

20hViews 5.6KLikes 135Bookmarks 6
Eric Zelikman@ericzelikman

@_oleh nobody would perform such an own-goal, right?

23hViews 5.8KLikes 123Bookmarks 2
elie@eliebakouch

@ericzelikman oh really? you've tried to reverse engineer our model training? fine, now let's see if you can reverse engineer if our model is gaslighting you or not

22hViews 1.7KLikes 48Bookmarks 1
Oleg Rybkin@_oleh

@ericzelikman Huh that’d be crazy. Surely no one would want to give their competition a free win like that

23hViews 2.8KLikes 47Bookmarks 1
Thomas D@tthomasdd

@ericzelikman @yacineMTB actually this has been happening since Claude Code was released… they are just being more transparent this time around

18hViews 391Likes 6Bookmarks 1
rishi@exyota

@ericzelikman @mattparlmer i hate to break it to you but we’re not their customer anymore, the USG is

22hViews 1.1KLikes 10
Esa@esa_was_taken

@ericzelikman and you get to pay them for the experience

23hViews 1.1KLikes 11
The New Policy 🌐@TheNewPolicy

@Suhail Anthropic are assholes.

Fable is useless, denying all requests cutting usage in half and cutting off users in 2 weeks.

A woke, retarded, douchebag company.

23hViews 244Likes 4
CommonSenseOnMars@CommonSenseMars

@Suhail Respond with a refusal or not.... just overall worrisome trend

23hViews 200Likes 1
Suhail@Suhail

@TheNewPolicy I do not think they are assholes but they will not get everything right all the time so it's important to steer them to the degree we can which I think is best done in a constructive way.

22hViews 196Likes 1
:)@latentfeeling

@ericzelikman .@_sholtodouglas @bcherny could someone over there please address this? i have a ton of empathy for safeguards, but this feels kinda wild..

21hViews 922Likes 3
Patrick The Loop Lord@Patrick9704133

@ericzelikman They've been doing it for years. They're just admitting it now. But they've been sabotaging AI researchers for years. It was noticable to me a longgg time ago in my own work.

16hViews 192Likes 3
PaintSandRepeat@SandRepeat

@bayeslord The kind of people who run popcopy

20hViews 60Likes 4
James Treakle-Smith@MultiHyphenArt

@ericzelikman @yacineMTB Makes perfect sense why they pissed off the Pentagon.

19hViews 186Likes 3
Rohan@proxy_vector

@ericzelikman Invisible degradation is the worst of both worlds: you keep the risk while deleting the feedback loop. If you need a boundary, make it explicit so users can adapt their workflow.

23hViews 532Likes 2
Kyle Kosic@kylekosic

@ericzelikman It's easy if you try

20hViews 363Likes 2
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