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Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

reuters.com

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Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#181

Post by fc417fc802 »

areoform wrote: post #166
tristanj wrote: post #25

Here's what is happening: Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing the…

Identity verification won't work. Nothing will. They are paying (and will continue to pay) US citizens sitting at home to copy-paste / type prompts out if they have to. But eventually they won't have to. Once there are enough spam PRs on github / uploads of claude conversations, enough mythos output used in production etc.; it'll just be the same albeit delayed. Doesn't matter either way. I feel for Anthropic's team…

That's an insightful perspective and I think I largely agree. But just for fun, I wonder if that isn't an argument in favor of making the function implementation impure. Perhaps "enhancing" all queries with some sort of search result (or query of a giant db) instead of charging for an explicit tool call. Not only is it sorely needed to prevent stale data but (on the process level) it breaks the purity assumption on which the approximation theorem depends (alternatively on the function level it introduces hidden inputs).

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#182

Post by _aavaa_ »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #175
gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

> what economics told me the free market was all about. Don't complain when US starts to play by the same rules China has been using for decades.

How do you think the major AI companies trained there model? Pirated books and anything that could be torrented and scraped of the web.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#183

Post by maxnevermind »

lokar wrote: post #137
avsteele wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with Alibaba? Are you saying Alibaba is the reseller? If not it sounds like you are describing a separate phenomenon.

They buy the logs from the bot farmers

Are logs somehow used for the purpose of training their own models or something else?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#184

Post by roenxi »

gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

I get the vague impression that this was written in a sarcastic way, but it has a straightforwardly true literal read because yes, this is what the free market is about and Anthropic will have to compete with the Chinese if they want a big share of the market. Chinese models are cheap and good; even without reselling Anthropic's services they're competitive. Which reading did you intend?

And, gotta say, the idea that the Chinese are better at selling US models than the Americans is hilarious. There might be an economic study here somewhere about just how anti-consumer and anti-progress their IP laws turned out to be. We've got an entire postindustrial revolution centred around who can ignore the most stupid laws.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#185

Post by vitally3643 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #43
walrus01 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine is ripping off my extremely efficient multi petabyte internet content suction machine" Sucking down petabytes of peoples' copyrighted content that they never granted a specific license to you to use seems to be an unavoidable and default part of the process of building any huge LLM.

So why was there crawling in 1998 but no LLMs?

We didn't have GPUs with hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM and tensor processing cores.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#186

Post by ffsm8 »

tristanj wrote: post #84
xgstation wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one reason why Deepseek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them. This one does not make sense to me at all. Deepseek and GLM are openweights, even US inference provider are selling them at much cheaper price. The price is cheap because the model is more efficient.

DeepSeek permanently cut its V4-pro API prices by 75% because they were too expensive. Without the price cut, Deepseek V4-pro tokens would have cost more than resold Opus 4.8 tokens. Opus 4.8 is a more capable model, so almost nobody was going to pay for V4-pro at the original price.

Urm, no? I man they did cut prices by 75% that part is true - but they reduced a starting price that was below sonnet.

Also it's a open weight model, doing that is impossible long term because the real price will be set by the other model providers, who priced it around 60% of sonnet inference cost. Had to look that up though, so that's today's pricing.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#187

Post by uproarchat »

guybedo wrote: post #139

This is a bit ironic, Anthropic complaining about a competitor using claude data to build its own product when Anthropic basically used all of human knowledge production to build claude, i don't think they paid every magazine, author, journalist, etc ... This is almost standard practice in any competitive industry anyways. Disassemble your competitor's product, study it and try to reproduce / improve.

It's a claude eat claude world out there

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#188

Post by XenophileJKO »

Mistletoe wrote: post #148
gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

AI was always going to be a race to the bottom and low margins. It’s why I’m extremely bearish on AI as an investment. It’s framed as some high margin business when it’s really going to end up like your toilet paper at Costco. You will use whatever is cheapest and gets the job done.

I used to think this.. but I think my opinion is changing. The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster.

So what you see is the market "stretching".. the bottom getting cheaper and the top end running away and getting more expensive. At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#189

Post by 14 »

gaiagraphia wrote: post #156
gruez wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. Yeah, like all those Chinese bootleggers selling DVDs for a few dollars rather than $20. Free market! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814

It's quite curious how multi billion dollar enterprises can't compete with a Chinese bootlegger with a big jacket, tbh. Imagine having such a warchest and being so bad at business, lol.

My biggest concern with pirating has always been malicious programs. But companies still need to show value in their products or people will pirate.

What added value can Anthropic give users not available to pirating users? That is what they should ask themselves.

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