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

reuters.com

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

#171

Post by matheusmoreira »

phoghed wrote: post #165
matheusmoreira wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amo…

So you believe a dude was wrongly punished, and to you justice would be for everyone else to also be wrongly punished? Kind of dumb tbh

My mind is not capable of the cognitive dissonance necessary to accept that billionaires get a slap on the wrist while mere mortals get police helicopters descending upon them. In order to maintain my mental health, I must have consistency.

So either enforce the law the same way against everyone correctly and proportionally, or your law and its enforcement are illegitimate and shouldn't exist. If some activity is harmless enough for some billionaires to do at massive scales and settle in court like it was some footnote in history, then nobody should be punished for it at all.

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

#172

Post by breppp »

messe wrote: post #140
breppp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 depend…

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

In my opinion further strengthening the CCP is a disaster for the world. A government that killed millions of its own citizens to stay in power is not who I would entrust super intelligence with. But apparently we are not going to agree on that

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

#173

Post by sbayg »

gruez wrote: post #169
matheusmoreira wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When AI companies were engaging in piracy, they were sanctioned as well. Some token settlement for an insignificant fraction of their revenue is not in any way a "sanction".

That just feels like more of a general complaint about how the justice system is set up. The same logic applies to how a $300 speeding ticket "is not in any way a "sanction"" for someone making $1M/year, or even a well paid SWE reading HN.

I feel you but are you possibly conflating civil and criminal justice? Tickets don’t scale with net worth of defendants, but class action penalties often do.

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

#174

Post by xienze »

monooso wrote: post #107
xienze wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many people pirating software stole every piece of copyrighted material in existence and then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves?

You keep using that word "stole", you can't steal digital information, remember?

> then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves?

Hasn't it also lead to distilled, free and open models that everyone can benefit from?

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

#175

Post by TZubiri »

xpct wrote: post #142
TZubiri wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never get tired of posting this answer because everyone on the internet is adopting this hot take: If you look at it with your eyes crossed, Anthropic and the chinese are doing the same thing. If you look at it with nuance 1 the chinese are doing way worse stuff, and 2 stealing from a thief would still be stealing 1. The chinese are making multiple accounts (at least 49,000)[1][2], using proxies/VPNs, possibly usin…

Let's not sane-wash Anthropic's book theft. No, they didn't just 'scan' the internet, they created a tool for worldwide license washing and got fined an insignificant amount for it.

You may be conflating the book thing with internet scanning.

On the book case, a class action case was brought to court and it was settled. There's no use in bringing it up further, it has been settled, and it bears no relation to the Anthropic v China case.

You like programming? Think of encapsulation, imagine if you had to think about f(x) but someone brings up y, now you have to think about f(x,y) and what other parameters might bear relationship? The law simplifies by compartimentalizing. And it doesn't even bear a tradeoff, judgment(case1,case2) isn't better than judgment(case1)+judgment(case2).

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

#176

Post by buran77 »

gruez wrote: post #162
buran77 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever? If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.

>Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever? None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. You don't get a pass for copyright infringement just because you're not copying the entire work. Same goes for a copy that's transient. You can't set up a bootleg movie theater in your home, even if you delete the movie file afterwards, and th…

> None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law.

And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant:

  (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  (2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
  (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Naturally remembering some parts of a legally purchased book verbatim is fair use. "Memorizing" the entire library obtained via torrents and incorporating that in a commercial product that can output all that content doesn't sound like fair use to me.

The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

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

#177

Post by mapontosevenths »

buran77 wrote: post #156
mapontosevenths wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?

Can you remember every part? Can you do this for every book in a library? Can you remember all that forever? If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.

> Can you remember every part?

No, and neither do LLM's. They're trained on vast quantities of data and retain only a fraction of it.

You might think of it as very, very lossy compression that generates new outputs rather than the original input unless something unintentional happens.

> If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.

I'm not. I just understand how it actually works. You either don't understand or are deliberately ignoring that what you just said is literally and technically untrue to make some sort of political statement.

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

#178

Post by mapontosevenths »

bee_rider wrote: post #151
mapontosevenths wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?

Does the law really not distinguish between mechanical processing of data, and humans learning from it? It seems surprising to be if every person who read a textbook is copyright infringing. It also seems surprising if something like a lossy compression algorithm is enough to protect you from copyright law. Somewhere between the two a line must be drawn… where we’d want to put that line, I guess, if up for quibbling.…

To me the distinction hinges on the output being transformative enough to be considered a new work. I think that most of the time LLM output is.

Sometimes they go a bit wonky and overtrain on specific phrases which can result in verbatim copies of brief sections of coontent. Thats a bug, not a feature.

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

#179

Post by mapontosevenths »

JsonDemWitOster wrote: post #153
mapontosevenths wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read Harry Potter I will remember some parts verbatim. Others I will tecall in only an abridged and lossy way. Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?

This analogy is disingenuous because by comparing the human brain to the machine, it ignores _scale_. Scale is absolutely important in copyright law. As a matter of fact, copyright law is among the various profound impacts of the---wait for it---printing press, a _machine_ for the mass production of books.

So if I watch a LOT of Disney movies THEN they own my own unique output forever?

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

#180

Post by BoxOfRain »

youre-wrong3 wrote: post #35
eunos wrote: post #12

What Claude Code did is absolutely mindboggling tho, if Chinese harness did that probably POTUS would lose sleep.

Maybe if they didn’t farm all the data from Claude to train their own trash models. Anthropic wouldn’t feel the need to do it.

Bit rich given where Anthropic sourced the data to train Claude with. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
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