"distillation attack" is such a loaded term that really pisses me off. Distillation is a technical term with real meaning, and historically requires logits which Anthropic does not provide. "Generated training data" is the correct term. It's not an "attack". And Anthropic undoubtedly also generates training data for each new generation of models, yet you never see them claim Fable is a distilled Opus.
2) The word "attack" is standard security vocabulary. Per RFC 4949:
attack
1. (I) An intentional act by which an entity attempts to evade
security services and violate the security policy of a system.
That is, an actual assault on system security that derives from an
intelligent threat. (See: penetration, violation, vulnerability.)
2. (I) A method or technique used in an assault (e.g.,
masquerade). (See: blind attack, distributed attack.)
3) The "attack" part of "distillation attack" refers to distillers creating tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts, using proxies to bypass georestrictions, deepfaked IDs, and paying real people to pass biometric KYC checks. Who then blended this in with real user traffic to conceal their behavior.
It doesn't refer to the AI training technique in any way.
If they acquired this data without the fraud, you'd have a point.