SaaS: the lesson from the Anthropic vs Alibaba fight

Imagine you spent years fine-tuning a way to serve customers. The tone of the messages, the order of the questions, the right moment to offer a discount. Then you hire an outside tool to automate all of it. Months later, a competitor serves customers in exactly the same way. A coincidence? Maybe not.

That was more or less the accusation Anthropic, the company behind the AI Claude, made against Alibaba in June 2026. The company said the Chinese giant "illicitly extracted" the capabilities of its model. Translating from legalese: they allegedly used Claude to train their own model, copying the behavior without copying the code. It sounds like distant Silicon Valley talk, but there is a very practical SaaS lesson here for anyone running a business in Brazil.

What on earth does "extracting a software's capabilities" mean

Let me explain without dragging it out. Every AI model learns from examples. If you ask millions of questions to a good model and save all the answers, you build a giant notebook of "question and correct answer". Then you train a weaker model using that notebook. The result is a second model that answers a lot like the first one, without ever having touched its guts.

In the jargon this is called distillation. It is like a student who memorizes the teacher's answers without understanding the subject, and still aces the test. Anthropic says this violates its terms of use. Alibaba denies it. The fight will play out in court and will probably take years.

The point that matters to you is not who wins. It is realizing that SaaS, that software you rent by the month, is a two-way street. You use the tool, and the tool watches you using it.

SaaS is not magic, it is rent

A lot of people treat software as a service as if it were magic that appears on the screen. It is not. It is rent. You pay a monthly fee and use a house that belongs to someone else. As long as you pay on time and follow the rules, everything is great. But the house was never yours.

This has three consequences that business owners forget:

• The data you throw in there falls under their rules. Every file, every conversation, every spreadsheet you upload to an outside tool starts living inside its terms of use.
• The rules change without asking you. The price goes up, a feature disappears, the privacy policy is rewritten. You get an email and that is it.
• You do not control the engine. If the company goes under, gets sold, or simply decides to shut the product down, your process stops with it.

I am not telling you to run away from SaaS. That would be foolish. I use plenty of it every day, and I recommend it to my clients all the time. What I am telling you is to use it with your head on straight.

Software as a service is rent, not a deed. Treat it like rent.

The part nobody reads: the terms of use

Anthropic's fight started because of terms of use that were allegedly ignored. And here is an embarrassing truth: almost nobody reads those terms. You click "I accept" and move on with your life.

But inside that wall of text there are things that decide the future of your business. For example:

• Can the tool use your data to train its models? In many of them, yes, and you have to turn that off by hand.
• Can you export everything that is yours if you decide to leave? Or are you stuck with their format?
• What happens if you break a rule by accident? Do they suspend the account on the spot or warn you first?

You do not need to become a lawyer. You need to open the terms page, hit Ctrl+F, and search for the words "data", "training" and "cancellation". In five minutes you already know whether that tool deserves to receive sensitive information about your business.

I do this with every client before plugging in any automation. It is boring, it is unglamorous, but it has saved a headache more than once.

What is truly yours and what is rented

Here is the question that separates those who sleep well from those who get a nasty surprise: what in your business is irreplaceable?

Do this mental exercise. If your main tool vanished off the map tomorrow, what would you lose forever and what could you rebuild? Is your customer list yours or does it live only inside an app? Your texts, your prices, your way of selling: is that stored somewhere you control or scattered across third-party services?

A concrete example. I had a client who ran his entire customer service inside an automated messaging platform. It worked well. The problem is that the conversation history, the gold of his business, was locked inside there. No easy way to export it. All it took was the platform changing the plan for him to be left with no ground under his feet.

The solution was not to drop the tool. It was to set up a routine that copied that history to a database that was his. The tool kept doing the heavy lifting. But the most important asset started living in his own house. If the platform disappeared, he could switch providers without losing the memory of his business.

That is the opposite of being a hostage. And it did not cost a fortune, it cost a few hours of setup.

How to use SaaS and AI without handing over your soul

You cannot run a modern business without SaaS. The productivity these tools give is real. The question is how to use them without becoming the Alibaba in someone's story, or without becoming the victim. A simple script I follow:

1. Separate the core from the tool. The core is what makes your business you: customers, know-how, your way of selling. The tool is what executes. The core lives at home. The tool can be rented.
2. Keep a copy of what matters. Every piece of information that hurts to lose needs an exit, a backup, an export from time to time. If the tool does not let you export easily, that is already a yellow flag.
3. Read the data part of the terms. Five minutes. Every time.
4. Prefer tools that talk to each other. Software that exports and connects gives you the freedom to switch. Software that locks you inside gives you dependence.
5. Treat your own processes as property. That flow you fine-tuned is valuable. Document it, store it, do not let it exist only inside a tool that is not yours.

Notice that none of these steps requires being technical. It requires treating the business like an owner, not like a distracted user.

The message worth more than the gossip

The clash between two tech giants will make headlines and short memories. Three months from now nobody remembers. But the principle behind it holds for your ten-person business the same way it holds for the billion-dollar company: what makes you unique cannot sit under someone else's control.

A good tool speeds you up. A poorly used tool traps you. The difference between the two is just the attention you pay before clicking "I accept".

If you want to look at your automations and tools with that owner's eye, to see what is truly yours and what is hanging on a third party's goodwill, that is exactly the kind of thing I help organize. Take a look at who I am and how I work.

SaaS is not magic. It is rent. And the house was never yours.

Anthropic's fight against Alibaba sounds like Silicon Valley talk, but it has a practical lesson for anyone running a business here.

Every piece of data you upload to an outside tool starts living under its rules. The price changes, a feature disappears, and you just get an email.

What makes your business unique cannot live on the goodwill of a third party.

Customers, know-how, your way of selling: that lives at home. A tool can be rented.

If you want to look at your automations with that owner's eye, this is exactly what I take care of.

#SaaS #Automation #SmallBusiness #AI #DataManagement