I Read the Anthropic Legal Prompts That Crashed $285B in Stocks

https://thomas-witt.com/blog/285-billion-wiped-out-because-of-a-text-file/

by thomas_witt • 6 months ago

3 2 6 months ago

chrisjj• 6 months ago

Don’t get me wrong: The prompts are well-crafted. But: They’re not magic. They’re structured instructions for tasks that legal professionals have been doing for decades.

If this is trying to say why these prompts aren't bad news for the profession, I think it just did the opposite.

They were taken as bad news because instructions to "AI" that genuinely execute tasks that legal professionals have been doing for decades IS magic. Obviously very bad magic for the future of the existing legal profession and the $billions invested in it.

Whether its genuine or not is of course a different matter. But hey, there's no telling investors who seriously believe stocastic parrottry is AI, especially when they've bet $billions on that self same delusion.

itay-maman• 6 months ago

There's another angle here: in the LLM era, markdown files in a public repo actually are apps.

When Google announced free turn-by-turn navigation in 2009, Garmin dropped 16% and TomTom dropped 21% — in a single day[1]. Investors weren't irrational; they recognized Google was giving away for free what others charged $150+ for.

Same dynamic here. Haiku/Sonnet/Opus are the hardware, Cowork is the operating system, and those markdown files are the apps. Together they deliver real utility that previously required paid SaaS or billable hours — at near-zero marginal cost. The market's read may have been hasty, but the underlying concern is real.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/29/9634146/google-MAPS-kill...

I Read the Anthropic Legal Prompts That Crashed $285B in Stocks

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