“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3” • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by FpUser » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

smeeth wrote: post #144

himata4113 wrote: post #62

Does this matter? Distillation is not illegal by every definition of the word. 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. Another example is that it appears that the upper limit of what you can do is ultimately dependent on people working on the model, otherwise grok would be a LOT more competitive pre…

Uh, what? > 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…

>"A lack of prosecution does not make something legal"

Plainly who gives a flying fuck. The US can claim whatever rules they want and so can China or any other country. On international level all those rules are artificial constructs unless they can be enforced. China can just say for example that they do not recognize copyrights /patents / whatever so it is "legal" for them.

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

#202

Post by nchmy » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

We have information that Claude distilled billions of copyrighted, and otherwise-created-by-others, materials for the development of their entire business.

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

#203

Post by FpUser » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

smeeth wrote: post #163

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the models stole the entirety of written knowledge on the internet to train. They are being sued for the few cases where we have some proof of what they did because of some whistleblowers, all the rest will just go unpunished. They breached Github TOS, robot.txt's, copyright, patents every form of IP protection under the sun from a billion sources. It's just ridiculous for the thieves to cry about someone else…

Do you care about the law or not? I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

[flagged]

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

#204

Post by xyzsparetimexyz » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

MiguelVieira wrote: post #110

Here's a site that asks the same questions to 22 models and compares how similar their responses are. https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full According to these results GLM 5.2 is very similar to Google Gemini and Kimi K3 is very similar to Fable 5. The American frontier labs are not similar to each other.

Interesting. This dooes lend credence to the distillation idea. Good for them!

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

#205

Post by wnmurphy » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

It's funny to me that these models were created by effectively "distilling" all available content including the proprietary works of many other people, but now it's a problem that someone is doing the same to them.

You're using available information (copyrighted works, or the output of another model) to train a model to encode the information in a new form. Why is the former not theft, but the latter is theft?

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

#206

Post by smeeth » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #180

smeeth wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you care about the law or not? I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

For me, when it specifically comes to copying, I don't think it's bad to copy a copier. (And by that I mean Anthropic has no valid complaints against Moonshot. Any valid complaints from anyone in the original corpus are valid against both of them now.) In this way, it is different from literal theft. Stealing money/objects from a thief and keeping them is not justified.

It's a little different in this case, since 1) not all the data Ant used was stolen and 2) they did contribute significantly to the value of the stolen good.

An analogy might be a baker stole 20% of the flour used to bake their special bread, which was then stolen. Both thefts are obviously wrong and bad.

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

#207

Post by TonyZYT2000 » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

throwa356262 wrote: post #12

Kimi K3 was released July 16, Fable ban was lifted on July 1 but access was still limited. How did Moonshot "distil" a huge model in such short time and still had time to run the benchmarks and do the usual release thingies? I think Anthropic is desperate to stop foreign competition and the administration is happy to help because they too are heavily invested in these companies

I think the accusation implies Kimi has gained time travel capability (distilled from fable probably) to have enough time distilling fable. Given they can travel time now, I think it is fair to call them a threat to national security.

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

#208

Post by stldev » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

So company who stole stuff to make their stuff is mad because another company is stealing their stuff.

And now a regime best known for lying to their own people is the one trying to convince me?

Go, China!

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

#209

Post by noncoml » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

Yes, I know this is not Reddit but Clarkson’s “Oh no! Anyway…” is the perfect, and most fitting, reaction to this. Nothing else to say

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

#210

Post by runako » Wed, Jul 22, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

smeeth wrote: post #163

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the models stole the entirety of written knowledge on the internet to train. They are being sued for the few cases where we have some proof of what they did because of some whistleblowers, all the rest will just go unpunished. They breached Github TOS, robot.txt's, copyright, patents every form of IP protection under the sun from a billion sources. It's just ridiculous for the thieves to cry about someone else…

Do you care about the law or not? I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

It's a rational position to care about the law, but insist on a queue when related parties are involved.

In this case: resolve the theft claims against the US frontier labs, and only then let them make claims against third parties. It would be totally unreasonable for (say) OpenAI to extract a settlement from Moonshot and use that to pay its own claims. Ordering matters.