Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities • Hacker News Board

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#271

Post by jujube3 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

m-ee wrote: post #123

gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

It never did. In debt the first 5000 years Geaeber makes the case that pure “free market” trade has never really existed in “the west”. The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.

Graeber was a confabulator with a very loose grasp of the facts, though.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#272

Post by chews » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:16 AM UTC

epsteingpt wrote: post #30

tristanj wrote: post #25

Here's what is happening: Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing the…

How are they 'streaming' the responses and 'pooling' the tokens? Do they have MacBooks in the US that run the queries and stream the outputs back to China?

ask your gpt how does openrouter work, then ask, how do proxies work.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#273

Post by toss1 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:16 AM UTC

Nevermind government edicts & bans -- this seems like reason enough for them to require Know Their Customers, require ID, and shut of certain nations.

Failing to have done so seems to have allowed 25000 fake Chinese accounts to walk off with their product...

OFC I wouldn't trust the Chinese enough to ack their models the time of day, but Anthropic seems to have allowed far more ... yikes

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#274

Post by toss1 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:18 AM UTC

gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#275

Post by phs318u » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:19 AM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #215

roenxi wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the vague impression that this was written in a sarcastic way, but it has a straightforwardly true literal read because yes, this is what the free market is about and Anthropic will have to compete with the Chinese if they want a big share of the market. Chinese models are cheap and good; even without reselling Anthropic's services they're competitive. Which reading did you intend? And, gotta say, the idea that…

> the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious This is not the right deduction. China blocks foreign AI from operating there.

> China blocks foreign AI from operating there.

Given the current US government's tightening of export control restrictions and the introduction of a bipartisan bill to block use of Chinese AI in federal agencies, I'd say the two countries' positions are not far apart.

https://apnews.com/article/ai-china-united-states-competitio...

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#276

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

tristanj wrote: post #25

Here's what is happening: Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing the…

Why aren't these on openrouter?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#277

Post by chews » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

randomboy3423 wrote: post #21

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 for

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#278

Post by ygouzerh » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

HaloZero wrote: post #39

amazingamazing wrote: post #15

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.

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 chrome

Probably some business will popup, like: "rent part of your unused subscription", or even: "proxy tokens with a premium", eg. 5.5 USD on Opus 4.7 paid by the distiller to the user, that will then only spend 5 USD.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#279

Post by anematode » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:25 AM UTC

usef- wrote: post #246

anematode wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it's hard to take seriously any complaint about "stealing" Anthropic's services, when their entire business is based on massive theft.

The US labs do seem to have announced a lot of licensing deals though, and are buying things today due to the previous lawsuits. At what point will we be better to support a lab that pays (some) licenses today vs the ones that pay none? Some of the deals are in the hundreds of millions, so I suspect licensing is over a billion today? (Pure guess). That might become a big disadvantage in a price (or content) war.

I know (via probing these models) that some of my work is in the training data. My mailbox is open.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#280

Post by janalsncm » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:26 AM UTC

gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

If you continue studying econ you will learn about the various failure modes of free markets including the free rider problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem