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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

#91

Post by ammo1662 »

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.

China also have trust issue with American companies. Most of State-owned companies will not use those services even if they can directly access them.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#92

Post by mlmonkey »

gruez wrote: post #52
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…

>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs. >Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of doll…

Maybe these resellers are using stolen American credit card numbers? Reselling Claude access seems to be a nice way to launder the money.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#93

Post by rconti »

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…

Wait, so is your theory mutually exclusive to Anthropic's claims of "theft of capabilities"?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#94

Post by cr125rider »

ralph84 wrote: post #61
avaer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.

Almost all consumer services have a built-in level of breakage that make them profitable. Mobile providers certainly wouldn't be able to offer unlimited calling if everyone was actually on the phone 24x7.

The over subscribed gym model!

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#95

Post by OutOfHere »

rikima_ wrote: post #76
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #31

If you're an AI booster surely you'd think this was a good thing as it means more models are available in more places to more people more easily. I'm exactly the opposite, and I think this is a good thing because I want Anthropic to suffer.

so it’s a good thing whichever way you look at it

That's exactly right. One can be an AI booster and want Anthropic to suffer, all for the greater good of promoting access and diversity of AI.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#96

Post by jiggunjer »

tristanj wrote: post #82
gruez wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs. >Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of doll…

It's very difficult for people to create personal Anthropic accounts from China. Anthropic blocks Chinese bank cards, so people must pay with a foreign bank card, which they likely don't have. And even if they manage to set one up, they have to access it via VPN, which eventually gets the account flagged. They then have to complete identity verification, which most Chinese users are unable to pass. There's a similar…

And phone number verification too? So that's 3 hurdles to jump to just get opus.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#97

Post by cr125rider »

conception wrote: post #10
drillsteps5 wrote: post #3

I'm looking forward to the trial where Anthropic will have to disclose sources of their training data, and then explain why they are entitled to charging customers for using regurgitated training data but Alibaba which trains their models on Anthropic's models are not. Should be fun. Edit: clarification

They already did and paid 1.5B https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/wh...

Meta/Facebook got away with it though right?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#98

Post by sailingparrot »

nonethewiser wrote: post #59
amazingamazing wrote: post #15

Distillation is fundamentally impossible to protect against. All you can do is slow them down. Change my view. Eventually these Chinese companies will release some extension like Honey, which will sit on top real, non-Chinese clients and send everything to China anyway. It's over.

Im not so sure because we only seem to see distillation from China. What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude, GPT, etc. Do they simply lack the ability to? Point being there may be no technical solution but there may be a political one (theoretically).

Meta Spark is rumored to have distilled Claude to some extent, early Gemini models as well. I think the biggest factor is that Chinese companies arent really afraid of being sued by Anthropic because the juridictions are so disconnected. European/US companies don't have the same protection.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#99

Post by jadar »

xgstation wrote: post #80
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…

> 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.

If resold Anthropic tokens undercut even the at-cost open-weight model tokens, because they're reselling subsidized subscription tokens, then you'd have to start selling open-weight model tokens at a loss in order to match them.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#100

Post by TurdF3rguson »

gruez wrote: post #55
avaer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.

But if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.

There's still per-window and weekly limits though, so it's not really like that.
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