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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

#951

Post by ethbr1 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #697
yokisan wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would think Anthropic could point Mythos at this to solve the reseller problem outright: - Purchase multiple accounts via resellers - Send messages that contain a UID - Capture these in Anthropic's logs - Shut down account. Use any metadata to identify related accounts /loop

> One would think Anthropic could point Mythos at this to solve the reseller problem outright You're assuming Anthropic want to stop it. I think it serves their interests more to be able to release stories like this from time to time, to feed to the US government, in an attempt to get the Chinese competition shut down.

No, it more likely serves their IPO story with growth metrics.

One doesn't ban a large chunk of the user base before IPO, because "Well, if you dig into the numbers and discount the drop from banned accounts..." is less impressive than rocketship growth (even if fraudulently fueled).

Expect more effective measures to be deployed post-IPO.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#952

Post by DrewADesign »

4d4m wrote: post #947
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…

Thanks. This is a widely misunderstood part of the market that the frontier companies are either unaware of, or don't see as a threat. Consumers are flocking to this, its better than dealing with their limits, changes, and opaque pricing. Funny enough, frontier companies are literally training their users to seek alternatives, local models, and distilled models to meet their throughput needs.

It’s not that they don’t understand that it’s a problem, it’s just that the easy way to address it is with reduced, flat-rate pricing… but they are already losing gobs of cash on their regular users. Their business model, as it stands, is not sustainable. That’s not saying they won’t find a stable one, but the one they have now is definitely not. The external cash is drying up, and they need to figure out a way to shed the low-revenue users, and charge the remaining users a lot more or they’re going to go under. They would probably do a goddamned backflip if every flat rate user that wasn’t willing to switch to API pricing went local, or even better, went with a competitor.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#954

Post by throw10920 »

bg24 wrote: post #414

Relevant article - https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist... (3 labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts). So extraction in this context is distillation. While it is obvious to many, a modern LLM is built in roughly three stages: the foundation (pretraining) model, then SFT/supervised fine-tuning (distillation makes it easy), then the…

> Companies like Anthropic spent millions building those fine-tuning examples. A follower can shortcut that on both cost and time by distilling, and it will keep happening: every time the frontier lab climbs higher, others will find a way to shortcut the new gap.

The generalization of this is: technologically advanced societies only continue to function as long as you prevent people from circumventing the technological business model (initial R&D investment that is recouped by selling units of the product above their manufacturing cost) by stealing your R&D (allowing them to sell units based on manufacturing cost alone, because they externalized their R&D to you).

This means both taking action against malicious actors inside your system of governance (IP laws in your country) and outside of it (sanctions, internet blocks, ITAR restrictions).

An honest competitor is perfectly capable of competing on price without stealing IP - see Mistral and that newer EU model that's trained on actually licensed content.

And I agree - we want a wide variety of models, from less-capable (but far cheaper) to those that maximize intelligence at any cost.

But those advocating for China distilling US models are just advocating for wealth transfer from the latter to the former - and highly likely to be 50 cent party members.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#955

Post by throw10920 »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #62
seany wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even come up with a reason to find it wrong.

I personally bristle at the corporate espionage and IP theft that China has undertaken the last few decades. I can't help but respond here whenever anyone brings up the inane comparison to Samuel Slater. But with this, I don't have an issue. There is no theft since what is being used is the exact product that is being delivered. Yes, it's breaking the ToS, but ToS are generally bullshit. Anthropic surely broke thousa…

> I personally bristle at the corporate espionage and IP theft that China has undertaken the last few decades.

I get the feeling that this is widespread, but I usually only see articles about individuals that are linked to the PRC somehow (e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-10/ex-apple-...), which is somewhat tenuous - the steelman argument is that they're just acting on behalf of their employer, not the country itself, and that this is corporate espionage, not economic warfare. Could you send me what you've seen so I can learn more?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#956

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

Why cant anthropic just sign up to those resellers, rack up some usage and then just start banning tf out of them? Reverse uno

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#958

Post by kazinator »

> Anthropic said the campaign was conducted between April 22 and June 5, 2026, and generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts.

Anthropic's entire business is based on actual stealing.

But when someone creates 25,000 legitimate accounts using mechanisms that Anthropic offers to the public, they are conveniently called fraudulent.

"Fraudulent" is just any usage pattern I don't like. Oh, you skipped to the last chapter of my mystery novel to find out whodunit? Why that's fraudulent reading.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#959

Post by drillsteps5 »

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...

Interesting. Looks like the judge ruled using legally obtained knowledge (books, articles, etc) to train AI constitutes "fair use".

Given that US legal system is precedent-base that... changes things.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#960

Post by bandrami »

tristanj wrote: post #192
tamimio wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im ok with this! Is there a site that list all these resellers, or better, a openrouter-like for these resellers?

They're called 中转站 (transfer stations/proxies). They can be a bit tricky to find on your own, so I'd suggest asking your preferred AI to search in Mandarin for you. I linked a larger operator in the parent comment, or have a look at https://hvoy.ai/ which lists a ton. You can also find many on Funpay, which may be easier to use. This is one seller I found, they're reselling "real Max 20x subscription accounts", at ~9…

> Note that whoever you buy from will be able to read all your tokens, so don’t use it for anything confidential/financial.

Note that without an enterprise agreement, both OpenAI and Anthropic make no commitments as to what they will and won't do with your data either.

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