“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”

> Distillation is not illegal by every definition of the word

Note that Anthropic (and USG) alleges [0] not only that Kimi was distilled, but that they actively circumvented measures intended to stop distillation. There are multiple ways that's illegal, including:

- Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.

- Economic espionage: 18 U.S.C. §1831 criminalizes obtaining a trade secret through theft, fraud, or deception while intending that it will benefit a foreign entity.

- Trade-secret misappropriation: if Anthropic could argue industrial-scale querying reconstructed proprietary aspects of Fable (like by showing it produces similar outputs, as others have done) then it's illegal under 18 U.S.C. §1832.

- California computer-access statute §502 bars knowingly accessing a computer system and, without permission, taking, copying, or using its data.

- Computer Fraud and Abuse Act protects against the case where restrictions against an activity are circumvented (like Kimi is alleged to have done).

> There are millions of samples available on huggingface and models explicitely trained on output produced by fable. There has been no action taken against them.

A lack of prosecution does not make something legal. There is also the scale/commercialization thing, which isn't an issue with random tiny HF datasets/models. Remember: Kimi also sells K3 inference.

> kimi architecture is vastly different than that of fable

How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.

> US AI labs are inspired by opensource advancements just as much as open source labs are inspired by traces from models such as fable.

Cool. The difference is that one of those things is legal (because they chose to open-source) and one of those things is illegal theft of trade secrets (because it was stolen).

> Claiming in any shape or form that fable disillation is one of the primary reasons why kimi k3 is so competitive is slandering the work of other labs that cooperatively push the open-source models forward.

1) this has nothing to do with other labs, just Moonshot (and Z.ai, MiniMax, DS)

2) slandering or not it happens to be completely true, so, there's that

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

I generally agree, in the same sense that it's "fair" for the US and China to spy on each other. It's not a moral outrage, but it is something that the targets can and should try to prevent.

It is what built and sustains the movie and music industries. See: work for hire and 100+year copyright length

The tech industry: see: copyright and patent assignment from discoverer to corporation.

I know that corporations forcing me to assign patents and copyright to them was an incentive to take published works from "software practice and experience" and other technical journals, use them as the core of my work, and disclose that source to the company I worked for. Didn't stop them from applying for patents, however.

I think the discussion of copyright needs more refinement. We need to separate the discoverer's need for acknowledgment of development effort from the rent-seeking core of copyright.