Comment by zzzeek

not really. Here's their own product clarifying:

Based on the terms, Section 3, subsection 2 prohibits using Claude/Anthropic's Services:

  "To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services."

  Clarification:

  This restriction is specifically about competitive use - you cannot use Claude to build products that compete with Anthropic's offerings.

  What IS prohibited:
  - Using Claude to develop a competing AI assistant or chatbot service
  - Training models that would directly compete with Claude's capabilities
  - Building a product that would be a substitute for Anthropic's services

  What is NOT prohibited:
  - General ML/AI development for your own applications (computer vision, recommendation systems, fraud detection, etc.)
  - Using Claude as a coding assistant for ML projects
  - Training domain-specific models for your business needs
  - Research and educational ML work
  - Any ML development that doesn't create a competing AI service

  In short: I can absolutely help you develop and train ML models for legitimate use cases. The restriction only applies if you're trying to build something that would compete directly with Claude/Anthropic's core business.

So you can't use Claude to build your own chatbot that does anything remotely like Claude, which would be, basically any LLM chatbot.