Great read and interesting analysis! I’m less charitable toward Anthropic supposedly not distilling ChatGPT for training purposes. Maybe not today, but during the GPT-4 era when Anthropic was the underdog - I can see it happen. Packaged along with some of Amodei’s clever jumping through hoops to prove how that is, in fact, virtuous.
Distilling is only prohibited from chats you prompt. But there are lots in the open like the LMSYS Chatbot Arena data. It's a essentially one of the largest public sources of preference data, maybe still useful for boostraping RLHF and successor techniques (possibly a more highly educated contributor base than the low paid contractors), and was full of GPT-4-era inputs.
How is distilling prohibited? AFAIK, the input is mine, and the output is not copyrightable.