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- Hacker News
- So when Anthropic uses millions of copyrighted works to train their model, that's fair use, but when Alibaba uses Anthropic's model to train their own, that's infringement?by aftbit
- Rules for thee but not for me.
- A partly insider on this.
I think Anthropic is just marketing / bluffing, because they don't even have the data.
They do distill the models, but they don't go to Anthropic, they just use platforms like aws bedrock, there are too many restrictions on Anthropic's own platform.
- there are vibe coded proxies that act like Claude Code. they use the sub not the api key. but they give you api key functionality... I know this cause I have the vibes.... and it works on every one of the other harnesses, it just takes some mitmproxy work... but ya. it's fair to say these are not the droids you're looking forby chews
- >they just use platforms like aws bedrock, there are too many restrictions on Anthropic's own platform
This is actually the only way that what Anthropic is alleging would make any kind of sense. And, as a matter of fact, is exactly what every enterprise does to train models.
This kerfuffle should be interesting to watch.
But, as always, everyone (in the US) should fully download all the Chinese models while you can. I suspect this may be the "Phantom Menace" they use to render illegal our use of Chinese AI tech just as they've rendered illegal our use of Chinese cars. Only difference is, we peasants may need the Chinese AI tech to have any chance of competing with Big Tech in the future.
And even with the Chinese tech, as Big Tech spreads their AI out into more and more niche areas, we'll likely still not be able to build startups that can compete with them.
It's just that without Chinese AI tech, we'll have no chance at all.
by bilbo0s - Unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, companies like DeepSeek, Alibaba, z.ai open source their models which allows for true model to model distillation rather what you can do when the model is only accessed via an API with its reasoning chain hidden away.
What Alibaba is doing is that they are tuning and training their models based on usage data from someone accessing Anthropic's models; in Anthropic's terms of service that usage data does not belong to the end-user but to Anthropic and they are trying to elevate this breach of their tos to a national security issue.
To me the battle between open source and closed source AI is literally a battle between good and evil.
Between a dark future where computing is centralized, surveilled and controlled by one or two entities. And a lighter future where computing is de-centralized, principally in the hands of end-users, who are ultimately free to understand, tinker and build what they want.
While I appreciate the freedom and wealth of the west; on this point we are clearly heading down the wrong path.
by chvid - Open weight and open source are different things!by Schiendelman
- > The strike by Alibaba is described as a "distillation" effort, which Anthropic has said involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.
I don't see what's wrong about this.
> Anthropic said the campaign was conducted between April 22 and June 5, 2026, and generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts.
What makes the accounts fraudulent? If they have paid the agreed price, surely it's fine? If they haven't paid, why did Anthropic provide them service?
by tasuki - > What makes the accounts fraudulent?
Fake identity? And general deception about the use
by eviks - I mean they could read the traces and learn it themselves right? /sby ozgrakkurt
- Because Anthropic has terms of service with more stipulations than just "you must pay and can use the service for any purpose"?by wilg
- "illicitly", Unless they broke in your servers and took your model weights it's not illegal. Hell, you are the guys that pirated all the worlds works, that was actually illegal.Breaking your terms of service is not illegal regardless how much you would like it to be.
And lets not forget they paid you for the tokens.
- > Unless they broke in your servers and took your model weights it's not illegal.
Even if they did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Leaking frontier model weights after the oligarchs spent their trillions training it is the best possible outcome for humanity. Whoever does that is a hero, the sort of person people used to write cyberpunk books about.
- What exactly is illicit about what they did?
Legally, model output cannot be protected by IP laws whether domestic or international. The most they can hope for is civil relief which is a stretch given the literally illicit methods they used to train their models.
Ahtoropic got treated the same way it has been treating everyone else. This is the bed they made and now they, too, have to sleep in it.
- > This is the bed they made and now they, too, have to sleep in it.
How will they sleep at night on that giant pile money.
by wayeq - Anthropic is master of Newspeak (see previously bugs -> vulnerabilities wrt Mythos). Distillation violates their terms of service, which is a civil offense, not a criminal one. It is not illicit, illegal nor breaks any laws.by InkCanon
- Distillation is fundamentally impossible to protect against. All you can do is slow them down. Change my view.
Eventually these Chinese companies will release some extension like Honey, which will sit on top real, non-Chinese clients and send everything to China anyway.
It's over.
- It's just like web scraping is impossible to guard against.
Change my mind.
by wg0 - Doesn’t that require them to register an account using the browsers they’ve compromised? If anthropic adds identity verification won’t that cut that down. Maybe it will let them use Gemini inside of chromeby HaloZero
- Jensen Huang likely agreed with you and tried to change Dario Amodei's view on that, but that attempt appeared to have failed.
So there's that.
by fg137 - One simplistic way to describe distillation would be to try everything imaginable and cache the response. But trying everything imaginable is hardly trivialby redwood
- I can't even come up with a reason to find it wrong.by seany
- Im not so sure because we only seem to see distillation from China. What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude, GPT, etc. Do they simply lack the ability to?
Point being there may be no technical solution but there may be a political one (theoretically).
by nonethewiser - Distilled models are necessarily behind so long as models are progressing. Models are progressing. Maybe it will be over some time in the future.
And Berkeley’s “False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs” found imitation closes the style gap fast but there is a large capability gap.
by nonethewiser - It's too late to prevent distillation of some capabilities, like writing code or finding vulnerabilities [1].
But an AI lab can continue to produce immense economic value without releasing the model publicly for potential distillation. For example, it could use a model solely in-house to develop therapeutics.
Hopefully there's a future where others can access frontier models, but it's not neccessary if preventing proliferation through distillation is considered more important.
[1]: See the notes on distillation in https://dualuse.dev/posts/export-controls-on-fable
by lebovic - Relevant article - https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist... (3 labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts). So extraction in this context is distillation.
While it is obvious to many, a modern LLM is built in roughly three stages: the foundation (pretraining) model, then SFT/supervised fine-tuning (distillation makes it easy), then the RL/RLHF stage on top (most effort-intensive). For today's reasoning models, RL/RLHF is becoming the most compute-intensive part.
Companies like Anthropic spent millions building those fine-tuning examples. A follower can shortcut that on both cost and time by distilling, and it will keep happening: every time the frontier lab climbs higher, others will find a way to shortcut the new gap. There's very little Anthropic can do beyond fraud prevention and blocking accounts that violate their terms of service.
On the policy question, I'm completely against banning Chinese models. I'm a heavy Claude Code user and I'll keep being one. But there should absolutely be price competition. China is eating the rest of the world for breakfast, lunch and dinner on manufacturing, and it did not help to ban them. Frontier pricing can't sit at 10x a capable competitor. It doesn't need to be at par either — demand is higher, and quality, trust, and fewer tokens to finish a task are worth a premium — but 4–5x is defensible.
by bg24 - > Companies like Anthropic spent millions building those fine-tuning examples. A follower can shortcut that on both cost and time by distilling, and it will keep happening: every time the frontier lab climbs higher, others will find a way to shortcut the new gap.
The generalization of this is: technologically advanced societies only continue to function as long as you prevent people from circumventing the technological business model (initial R&D investment that is recouped by selling units of the product above their manufacturing cost) by stealing your R&D (allowing them to sell units based on manufacturing cost alone, because they externalized their R&D to you).
This means both taking action against malicious actors inside your system of governance (IP laws in your country) and outside of it (sanctions, internet blocks, ITAR restrictions).
An honest competitor is perfectly capable of competing on price without stealing IP - see Mistral and that newer EU model that's trained on actually licensed content.
And I agree - we want a wide variety of models, from less-capable (but far cheaper) to those that maximize intelligence at any cost.
But those advocating for China distilling US models are just advocating for wealth transfer from the latter to the former - and highly likely to be 50 cent party members.
by throw10920 - Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgement to the work done by Xerox on the Alto and Star operating system.
"you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!"
Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
by walrus01 - I’d agree with you if it doesn’t cost billions to train models.by Nicholas_C
- “You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen!”by taneq