I'll just leave it here: "Anthropic's downloading of over seven million books from pirate sites like LibGen constituted infringement, the judge ruled, rejecting Anthropic's "research purpose" defense: "You can't just bless yourself by saying I have a research purpose and, therefore, go and take any textbook you want." https://www.joneswalker.com/en/insights/blogs/ai-law-blog/wh...
Yet they did not need to destroy the models which were trained with them?
Should we require the destruction of the brains of those that watch pirated movies?
This is a bit ironic, Anthropic complaining about a competitor using claude data to build its own product when Anthropic basically used all of human knowledge production to build claude, i don't think they paid every magazine, author, journalist, etc ... This is almost standard practice in any competitive industry anyways. Disassemble your competitor's product, study it and try to reproduce / improve.
Yeah, and I believe Anthropic would "distill back" without thinking twice, if the other model would be good enough.
I'll just leave it here: "Anthropic's downloading of over seven million books from pirate sites like LibGen constituted infringement, the judge ruled, rejecting Anthropic's "research purpose" defense: "You can't just bless yourself by saying I have a research purpose and, therefore, go and take any textbook you want." https://www.joneswalker.com/en/insights/blogs/ai-law-blog/wh...
Yet they did not need to destroy the models which were trained with them?
Using them was allowed as fair use – it was the downloading of the pirated copies that was infringement. That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books.
> 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. Claude never provides the raw reasoning chain. What you see is just a summary of that reasoning. Getting the full thinking output requires an enterprise agreement. https://patrickmccanna.net/the-text-in-claude-codes-extended...
how hard is it to find a manager or ops team member at one of the enterprise companies and buy lets say 100gb of logs? the chinese lab can promise to anonymize the data before training, not release it raw and pay a good price. honestly you might just need to get data from a couple long sessions and feed it back to another model as an example to make synthetic reasoning chains. if the emulator model is good enough it…
Yet they did not need to destroy the models which were trained with them?
Should we require the destruction of the brains of those that watch pirated movies?
Different situations call for different responses.
When someone steals a watch, we force them to give it back. Yet when someone steals a cake and eats it, we don't force them to puke it back up.
If you pirate a movie, the court might very well force you to delete all the copies you made of the movie you downloaded, destroy DVDs you burned, etc.
Yet they did not need to destroy the models which were trained with them?
Using them was allowed as fair use – it was the downloading of the pirated copies that was infringement. That's why Anthropic switched to scanning paper books.
If using the books is fair use, then distilling the model, which is just a derived product of those books is also fair use.
These companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too.
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…
This may be the truth behind the alleged distillation incident.
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?
I'm not 100% sure it's not possible. If (I don't know) it's possible to freeze the temperature of the model so it's deterministic, and if you could make a map of produced words back to tokens (via HMM probably), then you can probably alter a minimal input and observe the output to model it. If you perform waves of such minimal alterations, you can expect to be able to locate the distance where each alteration impact the model (the idea being that a small alteration on output is likely due to the last layers of the models, and a small alteration is likely due to the deeper layer). Once you've located most of the last layer(s?) weights, you can try to solve for them. With a hundreds of billions weights model, the last layers will likely be so huge that it's probably unfeasible technically, but it's theoretically possible.
> 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"?
> Because Anthropic has terms of service
Not following terms of service doesn't necessarily constitute a fraud. It just means Anthropic can close an account that breaks the terms of service.