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

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#301

Post by xdennis » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:37 AM UTC

protimewaster wrote: post #153

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #145

The hypocrisy of Anthropic complaining about "illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities" and supporting the White House's accusation of China "stealing U.S. AI labs' intellectual property on an industrial scale" is hilarious. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al trained their models by ignoring the rights of copyright holders when harvesting whatever content they could. Now one of them is crying fo…

The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.

That's one aspect, which is a bit of a gray zone. But Anthropic trained on pirated books. That is explicitly illegal.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

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Post by crote » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:38 AM UTC

XenophileJKO wrote: post #188

Mistletoe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI was always going to be a race to the bottom and low margins. It’s why I’m extremely bearish on AI as an investment. It’s framed as some high margin business when it’s really going to end up like your toilet paper at Costco. You will use whatever is cheapest and gets the job done.

I used to think this.. but I think my opinion is changing. The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster. So what you see is the market "stretching".. the bottom getting cheaper and the top end running away and getting more expensive. At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to.

> The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster

Model improvement is already hitting diminishing returns, and people aren't willing to pay substantially more for a slightly better model. There's no "accelerating away" when the new models don't open up a huge new market. If anything, the companies burning huge amounts of money on marginal improvements will be undercut by companies happy to sell current models at a significantly lower cost.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

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Post by abc42 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:39 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?

Free markets work when paired with property laws that can be enforced if broken. If China could offer a cheaper solution in that framework, it would be as you say.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

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Post by anileated » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:40 AM UTC

icfly2 wrote: post #282

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…

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The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. I would not say PRC making LLMs cheaper is the best outcome (though it is better than nothing). The best outcome would be to make the practice of training on our data without consent illegal, which would simultaneously slow down economic change and make it more organic as well as give PRC companies less capabilities to extract.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

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Post by overfeed » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:40 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…

> which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots.

Lol. The irony is thick for anyone who ever had to attempt defense against an onslaught of American AI lab crawlers that ignore robots.txt

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#306

Post by petterroea » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:41 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?

China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop).

This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market.

However, I don't really mind China "stealing" from Anthropic. For us consumers we are getting the cake and eating it too. I.e we are getting rapid improvement to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in funding, yet the market remains big enough that there's a chance of it not ending up as a monopoly in 20 years. And venture capital are footing the bill. A part of their investment is practically being redirected to fund Chinese AI development. It lets us live out our lives as happy CAC farmers[1].

So I would argue its not as much of a "cheaper solution" as it is intentionally and maliciously abusing another company's product to extract more value than the billing plans intend (given an average user), and further subsidizing the product by selling this data to competitors. But I don't necessarily think its a bad thing for us end-users. Nor for the market. But it is bad for Anthropic and its investors.

[1]: https://phrack.org/issues/71/17

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#307

Post by throwccp » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:41 AM UTC

icfly2 wrote: post #282

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…

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Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#308

Post by bendews » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

8note wrote: post #290

icfly2 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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i still want those data sets to become public domain. open weights still isnt good enough

That's the conundrum isn't it? Anyone that posts their datasets would be immediately sued/blocked/boycotted to oblivion due to the obvious and blatant data theft, not to mention IP and copyright issues.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#309

Post by amanaplanacanal » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #274

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.

So all those companies selling at a loss to gain market share aren't part of the free market? Like openai, anthropic, and SpaceX?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#310

Post by mannanj » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

There's two basic kinds of distillation: 1) the massive [and dumb] method where you ask a question and use the answer as reinforcement (Black Box), and 2) more targeted distillation where you use one model to directly inform/train/guide another model (RLAIF). The latter is basically fine-tuning the model with direction from another model. Thousands of businesses do this every day to fine-tune. This is almost certainl…

>But if you show them a jailbreak of their model that bypasses their safety, they'll tell you that any model can eventually be jailbroken so don't worry about safety.

Yes this is in line with what Anthropic said in their public statements about their Fable access restriction by the government directive. The hypocrisy and inconsistency in their statements and behavior feels quite childish and controlling. I believe our companies and their leaders, friends among our other influential leaders and leaders from rich social classes, want to actively hurt most people as this behavior looks to be quite self-interested.