Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

Post by digitaltrees » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #803

w0m wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Distillation is NOT an attack. From the article - > 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts wouldn't that be considered an attack? Not sure what I'm missing here.

It's merely a ToS violation.

Post by ndriscoll » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #818

anon373839 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dramatization. The lede paragraph parrots Anthropic's talking point that distillation is an "attack", without using quotes that would alert the reader that this framing is a corporate talking point. Distillation is NOT an attack.

Distillation done via bulk automated activity of fraudulent accounts, in violation of a terms-of-service, can reasonably be called a "an attack" – specifically a "distillation attack" – even though distillation itself isn't necessarily an "attack". This is similar to how compromising an account through bulk automated trials of many passwords is reasonably called "an attack" – specifically a "dictionary attack" – even…

Post by throawayonthe » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

Post by ndriscoll » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

fny wrote: post #762

anon373839 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dramatization. The lede paragraph parrots Anthropic's talking point that distillation is an "attack", without using quotes that would alert the reader that this framing is a corporate talking point. Distillation is NOT an attack.

Distillation may not be an attack, but it is a ToS violation and could be seen as IP theft. Any reasonable company would be pissed if a competitor, especially at Ali Baba's size, leveraged that company's R&D to compete. It is in this sense, a corporate attack. If you want to roll your eyes at distillation concerns, you might need to excuse Anthropic for originally using pirated material to train their models.

  * trademarks (not using the mark)
  * patents (what patent?)
  * copyright (the code and models are all different, and machine outputs lack creativity and are not copyrightable) 
  * trade secrets (any member of the public has the same access to input/outputs. They're not accessing any secret)

Post by freejazz » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #756

crispyambulance wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard of neutrality that people here pretend to require from news organizations is not even remotely realistic. It was a timely story from Reuters. They do fast news feeds, like APnews. Could it have been better or more accurate? Sure, they could have gone into why distillation may or may not be seen as "an attack". But then it would have been a more involved story, defeating the purpose of a news feed. The Re…

Good enough slop to serve the masses. Doesn't need to be truthful because its fast? Why even both to write anything?