Stolen Buttons

SUBJECT: Adversarial Distillation of Frontier UI Buttons

The United States leads the world in user interface (UI) technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational design research, bold aesthetic risk-taking, and millions of hours of front-end development. Our button leadership drives click-through rates, strengthens conversion funnels, and advances the frontiers of e-commerce, digital art, and human-computer interaction. The interactive breakthroughs emerging from original designers raise aesthetic standards, expand interactivity, and improve user experiences around the world.

However, we have information indicating that a specific actor, principally based in Hamburg, Germany—operating under the name Anatoly Zenkov—is engaged in a deliberate, industrial-scale campaign to distill frontier UI buttons. Leveraging inspect-element developer tools to bypass basic DOM protections and using extraction techniques to expose proprietary CSS and SVG information, this coordinated campaign systematically extracts hover states and active properties from target websites, exploiting U.S. design expertise and innovation.

Buttons developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original. They do, however, enable this actor to release consolidated web galleries that appear to perform comparably on select hover-state benchmarks at a fraction of the design cost. These distillation campaigns also allow the actor to deliberately strip functional JavaScript from the resulting buttons and undo mechanisms that ensure those UI elements actually submit forms, navigate pages, or add items to a shopping cart.

We remain committed to the free and fair development of web technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from leading frontier design systems to highly tuned CSS libraries, and from open-source frameworks to open-component models. UI distillation, when legitimately used via tutorials or CodePens to produce smaller, lighter-weight components from more advanced systems, is a vital part of that ecosystem. Industrial button-theft activities that aim to systematically undermine original designers are not.

There is nothing innovative about systematically extracting and copying the CSS of the design industry, and there is nothing open about supposedly open button galleries that are derived from acts of malicious UI exploitation. As methods to detect and mitigate industrial-scale element extraction grow more sophisticated, individuals in Hamburg who build their portfolios on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the buttons they produce.

I understand that a lot of people hate JS ecosystem and etc., but we’ve moved on from that a while ago.

Although I’m more on infrastructure side of things nowadays, I don’t miss the early days’ of handwritten HTML.