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

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#331

Post by overfeed » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

petterroea wrote: post #306

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 wh…

> China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one

Chinese labs are also pursuing legit frontier-advancing R&D into efficiency and publishing papers in the open, a culture that's in retreat at top American AI labs

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#332

Post by a34729t » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

You know what? We should all get Claude Max subscriptions and max them out hard and post our full conversations on codeberg, as an open training set.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#333

Post by cindyllm » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

rekttrader wrote: post #329

anukin wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you say the same when these cheap llms are used in drones to target humans. The world models are exactly built with that direction in mind.

Cool beans boomer alarmist stance. The Chinese models here are doing what they’re supposed to price the market accordingly.

[dead]

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#334

Post by tasuki » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:04 AM UTC

> 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?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#335

Post by bayindirh » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #321

anileated wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The issues with LLMs go beyond just IP theft. There is no IP theft because LLM outputs aren't protected, just egregious ToS violations.

- Deriving a “no derivatives” licensed item is illegal, no?

- Selling a “no commercial” licensed item is illegal, no?

- Deriving and/or reproducing MIT licensed code without credit is illegal, no?

- Reproducing and/or deriving GPL code and not notifying and/or not making GPL is illegal, no?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#336

Post by eimrine » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

toobulkeh wrote: post #262

dualvariable wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Information wants to be free" Anthropic profited from training its models on all kinds of copyrighted information, live by the sword, die by the sword... Their model weights, training data, training methods, etc are all going to leak to China over time. Nobody on a site named _Hacker_ news should be all that upset about this.

You’re mistaking the original term hacker, a tinkerer of systems, for the black hat variety.

I suppose his point was that the both parties are black hats.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#337

Post by wilg » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:08 AM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #334

> 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…

Because Anthropic has terms of service with more stipulations than just "you must pay and can use the service for any purpose"?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#338

Post by bandrami » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:08 AM UTC

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #196

gruez wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814

Bootlegging is copyright theft. Is Claude output copyrighted? If anything, a tremendous amount of Claude’s input is copyrighted. If there’s any bootlegging going on it’s Anthropic that’s doing the bootlegging but having mirrored the video etc sufficiently to beat copyright law.

The current case law in the US is that the raw output of an LLM cannot be copyrighted without further meaningful arrangement or alteration by a human author.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#339

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:09 AM UTC

wilg wrote: post #337

tasuki wrote: post #334

> 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…

Because Anthropic has terms of service with more stipulations than just "you must pay and can use the service for any purpose"?

I'm sure all the artists and creators they stole from had stipulations too.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#340

Post by c1sc0 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:09 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.

At the very least the public should receive full open-weight open-source models in return for their transgressions. Failing that, may I suggest the guillotine?