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

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#341

Post by tripleee » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:10 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"?

violating their terms of service doesn't make it fraudulent?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#342

Post by chvid » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:11 AM UTC

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.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#343

Post by asadm » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:12 AM UTC

is there a good recipe or guide on doing a successful distillation these days?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#344

Post by fnord77 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:12 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…

Can you reach into the model and "transplant" weights directly?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#345

Post by noncoml » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:13 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.

Cough.. cough.. Uber.. cough cough AirBNB

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#346

Post by eviks » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:14 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…

> What makes the accounts fraudulent?

Fake identity? And general deception about the use

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#347

Post by digitaltrees » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:15 AM UTC

Call the wambulance a company that stole all of humanities public data to train a model is mad that someone used their model to train another model.

Give me a break. Every employee of anthropic is going to have $20m or more at the IPO.

I found out today that an employee of the home care agency I own is homeless. We are trying to figure out how to help her but it's shockingly common in the industry and there are limited resources to solve the reality of working homelessness.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#348

Post by petterroea » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:15 AM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #331

petterroea wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh yeah. Strategic disruption technique or not its a breath of fresh air.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#349

Post by bandrami » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:16 AM UTC

rconti wrote: post #93

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…

Wait, so is your theory mutually exclusive to Anthropic's claims of "theft of capabilities"?

No, it's part of the capability theft. They resell Claude tokens cheaply and then simultaneously log everything for distillation. Even if they take a small loss on the token sales it's much cheaper than the equivalent compute.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#350

Post by digitaltrees » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 5:17 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #252

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.

Seriously AI companies complaining about fair use is the biggest case of crocodile tears I can think of. Irony has been dead for a while, but they dug up the corpse and set it on fire anyway.

Totally agree.