Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 299 posts

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#131

Post by vlian2088 »

andersonpico wrote: post #117
vlovich123 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me, did the AI companies redistribute that copyrighted material to others and make their money that way? Did Kim use the copyrighted material to generate something novel from it? copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison.

But distribution isn't the only crime here, obtaining the material illegally apparently is a crime too. And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution?

>And the damn robot can also spit me harry Potter verbatim so I don't know how it would also not be distribution?

if you prompt it to, yes. just like your browser dutifully navigates to any copyright-infringing resource and GETs and POSTs whatever you ask of it.

(also it can't, not really, only small snippets before going off rails. LLMs aren't magic, they can't losslessly compress an exabyte of training data into a few terabytes of weights.)

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#132

Post by matheusmoreira »

phoghed wrote: post #105
matheusmoreira wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember how people used to justify their own personal software piracy A courtesy. There was never any need to justify it. > Isn't that at least something? Yes, it's a joke . Why do they get to infringe copyrights with impunity while normal people get destroyed? Either go after them like the copyright industry always does and punish them properly, or abolish copyright straight up. This "rules for thee but not for m…

So you don’t actually care, you just want them punished out of spite because some other guy was for doing something similar but not the same?

Correct. I'm one of the copyright abolitionists the other person alluded to. It's the selective enforcement that's disgusting.

I mean, what is this? Their balls suddenly drop off? They only have the audacity to prosecute random people? Smaller companies? When they're up against trillion dollar AI companies they suddenly become cowards? That's so incredibly disgusting, and it made me completely lose even the small amount of respect for copyright that I had managed to rationalize over the years.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#133

Post by breppp »

messe wrote: post #129
breppp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright law and IP law is not the same although everyone seem to conflate the two. Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images, it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass

> Copyright law and IP law is not the same although everyone seem to conflate the two. Copyright law is a subset of IP law. What IP is being infringed upon here? > Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country. > it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass Nobody…

> Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country.

That had happened progressively, thumbnails for example were ruled as fair use later on, DMCA safe harbor was a huge gift for tech companies because otherwise it would curtail the ability to create platforms (relaxing copyright protections in exchange of innovation)

> Nobody copied Anthropic's code. They used it's output to train another model. At most they violated some terms of service

Distilling a model is a method that can push the entire market to low margins and prevent companies from making money off such research. It also copies the Anthropic special parts (RLHF and other specific methods) rather than the "copy of the entire web" part

This is similar to what happened with Chinese reverse engineering of American manufacturing or PC clones killing IBM PCs.

Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no, that's why I assume this will be backed by law eventually

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#134

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #74
p0w3n3d wrote: post #31

[flagged]

Remember how Kim Dotcom got destroyed for criminal copyright infringement? One would think the big tech CEOs would face the same fate, that police officers would rappel down helicopters, storm their mansions and bring them out in cuffs. Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.

The trick here, imo, was the integration with the military industrial complex. It wasn’t very difficult of course, as automation has been a topic in warfare for decades, if not centuries.

But Eisenhower was right:

> In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#135

Post by midasz »

cryptonym wrote: post #123
vlovich123 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me, did the AI companies redistribute that copyrighted material to others and make their money that way? Did Kim use the copyrighted material to generate something novel from it? copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison.

This is confusing. I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? If so, why do we still pay for games and movies?

I pay for games because it's more convenient than pirating them. For movies and tv however... They make it so difficult to be a customer.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#136

Post by zahlman »

dan_i wrote: post #109
314 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Aaron Swartz did it for the benefit of other people. These fine people did it to uphold american values and enrich themselves at the expense of others. The law is clearly on their side.

Quick refresher on American values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_colonial_histor...

I thought this thread was about Alibaba's internal policies. How did we get here?

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#137

Post by bhouston »

londons_explore wrote: post #82
bhouston wrote: post #55

All remote AI are a massive security risk for individuals/companies/governments that may be targeted by the US government. It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies. It will give them access to the though process in t…

It is worth thinking about the fact the total throughput of even a big LLM provider isn't many megabits. If a token compresses to around a byte, worldwide AI input and output is around 1 gigabyte per second. For any intelligence agency, they can afford to keep and store all of that forever, and later do analysis on it.

> For any intelligence agency, they can afford to keep and store all of that forever, and later do analysis on it.

At the scale the AI companies are operating at, I think it isn't likely that they are sucking it all in right now.

More likely I think the intelligence agencies will get a real-time live tap into the raw data feed which they will process onsite for interesting things and then if things are flagged, they will log it in the intelligence agency systems.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#138

Post by JsonDemWitOster »

cryptonym wrote: post #123
vlovich123 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me, did the AI companies redistribute that copyrighted material to others and make their money that way? Did Kim use the copyrighted material to generate something novel from it? copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison.

This is confusing. I can torrent everything and do what I want with it, as long as I don't redistribute the exact same thing? If so, why do we still pay for games and movies?

IANAL (plus a whole suite of other caveats) but torrent-baiting works in Germany along these lines.

ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent.

In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it.

If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#139

Post by curtisblaine »

xienze wrote: post #87
matheusmoreira wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember how Kim Dotcom got destroyed for criminal copyright infringement? One would think the big tech CEOs would face the same fate, that police officers would rappel down helicopters, storm their mansions and bring them out in cuffs. Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.

Remember how people used to justify their own personal software piracy with arguments like "information wants to be free", "no one stole anything, you still have the data", "I was never going to buy it anyway", and "copyright should be abolished?" > Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims. Isn't that at least s…

No. I want either:

1. The copyright infringement of big corpos fully justifying my copyright infringement in the face of law

2. The copyright infringement of big corpos being prosecuted in the same exact way as my copyright infringement would.

There is really no middle ground.

Re: Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says

#140

Post by messe »

breppp wrote: post #133
messe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright law and IP law is not the same although everyone seem to conflate the two. Copyright law is a subset of IP law. What IP is being infringed upon here? > Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country. > it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass Nobody…

> Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country. That had happened progressively, thumbnails for example were ruled as fair use later on, DMCA safe harbor was a huge gift for tech companies because otherwise it would curtail the ability to create platforms (relaxing copyright protections in exchange of innovation) > Nobody copied Anthropic's code. They used it's output to train another model. At m…

> Distilling a model is a method that can push the entire market to low margins and prevent companies from making money off such research

Then it's on Anthropic to actually price their models accordingly so that distilling isn't profitable. Why does this need a legal remedy when market forces could easily resolve this?

> Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no

Good. The world needs to diversify away from dependence on US technology.

Post reply on HN