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The hypocrisy of Anthropic complaining about "illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities" and supporting the White House's accusation of China "steal

The hypocrisy of Anthropic complaining about "illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities" and supporting the White House's accusation of China "stealing U.S. AI labs' intellectual property on an industrial scale" is hilarious. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al trained their models by ignoring the rights of copyright holders when harvesting whatever content they could. Now one of them is crying foul for another entity doing exactly what they all did? Hilarious.

protimewaster 3mo ago
The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.
- AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
  > But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable. It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve: If one truly believes in personal sovereignty, how are shared resources paid for, such as roads, power grids, potable water, sewage services, fire departments, and police departments? It is also not a coincidence that leadership in many tech companies have expressed libertarian ideals.
  - slopinthebag 3mo ago
    What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? Because they definitely have answers to this question...
    - AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
      > What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? The latter I suppose. I qualify my answer because what few rational responses I have seen to this question are equivocations at best and thinly veiled myopic sophistry supporting personal greed in general.
      - slopinthebag 3mo ago
        The short answer is that "shared resources" in a libertarian system is a bit of an oxymoron. It's a category error. The long answer would probably be that access to these resources would be gated through pay-per-use, instead of a distributed taxation system. Of course for convenience you might end up with a structured way of purchasing a group of resources and it might even look like a roundabout way of taxation, although libertarians might argue that taxation is the roundabout way. Or they might give a different answer, there are different schools of libertarianism! * not a libertarian, but interested in niche political ideologies
        rmunn 3mo ago
        Plus, the question of voluntary vs. involuntary comes in. Taxation is, in most forms, involuntary. Don't pay your taxes, eventually you'll either be arrested or the government will compel your bank to hand over what you were supposed to pay; either way you're not allowed to say "I don't plan to use public roads so I don't want to pay for them" or "I don't want my money going to support the military, I'm fine with the military not defending me if the country is ever attacked" or whatever. You have to pay the taxes, and your say in how they get spent is very indirect. The libertarian ideal is voluntary payment for services. Don't want to pay for fire protection? You don't have to; the flip side of the bargain is that if you haven't chosen to pay for fire protection, the fire company is under no obligation to put your house out if it does catch on fire. The choice is yours, but you have to be wiling to accept the consequences of your choice as well. Note that I have not studied the various flavors of libertarian philosophy, so some of them might well disagree with what I just said. But the voluntary/involuntary thing is pretty important to libertarians as far as I know, so it's definitely worth mentioning here.
    - preg_match 3mo ago
      I think the typical answer is “free market” but that answer doesn’t sway because: 1. Nobody bothers to explain why something could function as a free market and 2. Nobody bothers to resolve the plethora of domains that de-facto cannot operate as free markets. So, in that sense, they don’t have answers. “Look over there!” is not an answer. Free markets are actually not a given. We have to build them and build in systems so that they can operate as free markets. How that intersects with healthcare, public utilities, etc is complicated. IME libertarians are reductionist and simple, which is why many people have just taken the route of ignoring their arguments.
      - slopinthebag 3mo ago
        I find this comment a bit odd. There is a ton of literature on the topic, as well as lively debate online. I would recommend both The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman and Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (specifically pt 2) as great readings on the topic. If one judges any idea by the average discourse on internet forums, especially throwaway comments, and trolling, no idea would ever stand up to scrutiny.
        preg_match 3mo ago
        I largely agree, but the bigger picture is that free market hand-wavy economics is the status quo. I’m especially critical because, in the west, it’s just accepted as fact. Yes there is reasoning behind specific implementations. But most people don’t know that reasoning. They apply hand-wavy reasoning to fit the status-quo. That, to me, is a problem: one which doesn’t exist in other economic theories by their nature. For alternative theories, it requires active effort and reading, because it’s alternative. What that doesn’t mean is that alternative theories are just magically correct. But what it does mean is that the average person arguing those positions are simply better informed. I’ve mostly just learned to ignore people, both online and in person, when they use the term “free market”. Maybe that’s self-destructive, it probably is. But ultimately I get tired of arguing with people who don’t put in even the first-tier of reasoning into their positions. Never mind second or third order effects.
  - walthamstow 3mo ago
    Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? Neither system resolves both problems. Extremist dogma is not a great way to run a society, but it does good numbers on social media, so here we are.
    - gmerc 3mo ago
      Only one is a reasonable problem in functioning societies, the other one mostly a fallacy.
    - dinfinity 3mo ago
      > Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad. Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.
      - walthamstow 3mo ago
        Your spidey sense is failing you, you're making assumptions you've got no ground for. I've voted for left of centre parties all my life. I was born in the NHS and I'll probably die there too.
        Xunjin 3mo ago
        Tbf I don't think he is implying you are certain political group/view/spectrum. He is just arguing your flip argument.
    - lambdaone 3mo ago
      Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation. Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.
- MagicMoonlight 3mo ago
  [dead]
- xdennis 3mo ago
  That's one aspect, which is a bit of a gray zone. But Anthropic trained on pirated books. That is explicitly illegal.
  - ares623 3mo ago
    I'd love to see an open-source project that's basically a Torrent client for downloading pirated material, but it trains an AI model "in the background" using the downloaded content. That way everyone can claim fair use for possessing copyrighted material, I mean there's precedent right?
    - blourvim 3mo ago
      I am not a lawyer, from what I understand that the precedent is that you can use copyrighted material in ML process. Even though meta has, allegedly, pirated the material, the cost of violation would be pennies compared to the ai spend, since that is the violation, not that they used those materials,
    - freejazz 3mo ago
      They were liable for copying the books in the first place, regardless of whether or not they trained the AI with them. Read the opinion.
  - lambdaone 3mo ago
    As I understand it what was "explicitly illegal" was copying the books, in the sense of mere copying before feeding them to the model, and this is what the Anthropic copyright settlement is about. Actually processing them through the model, though, was considered transformative and therefore fair use.
  - heroh 3mo ago
    so did Meta for Llama. The entire chat thread and email exchange was exposed in Discovery; apparently Zuck signed off on it. In one of the IM exchanges one of them say ‘everyone is doing it’ https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1879152507865485497?s=20 https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1879152507865485497?s=20
- eunos 3mo ago
  Anthropic, Dario especially seems have eternal grudge against China as a concept, that remind me of Thiel.
  - __rito__ 3mo ago
    Coming from him, I am not sure even that is real. It could very easily (and plausibly) be a part of the ongoing hype drama. "Our models so precious, US Gov has to revoke access to foreigner." - tuned up version: "Our models so advanced our #1 adversary is desperately stealing it from us."
  - manojlds 3mo ago
    All a facade no? It's just about regulatory capture.
    - eunos 3mo ago
      I dont think so, Altman seems more likely to play regulatory capture here, but Dario seems having pure and personal hatred.
    - freejazz 3mo ago
      Just overly hubristic
  - throwawayffffas 3mo ago
    He has an eternal grudge against anyone filling up his moat.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  >The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, The AI companies? That's been the common ethos of the internet for 40 years I mean, raise your hand if you ad block and have a hard drive of pirated content...
mannanj 3mo ago
there's no honor among thieves.
amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
It's not exactly the same, since any Claude output is public domain under current law. So the Chinese aren't stealing anything here.
tom2026hn 3mo ago
What's yours is mine, and what's mine is still mine.
1f60c 3mo ago
Not really. Data mining for AI is presumably fair use, whereas when you sign up for a Claude account, you enter into a legally binding contract that says you will not distill a model based on its outputs.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
  I guess they can try to sue. Good luck.
- iAMkenough 3mo ago
  “Legally binding” bs that a judge would laugh off.
deaton 3mo ago
Not really even in the same ballpark as what they did. These other labs are using AI generated content (which has already been ruled un-copyrightable) to train their models. Oh and they are paying for those tokens. So at absolute worst, they are violating the terms of service. The horror. Meanwhile these frontier AI labs pirated and scraped everything they possibly could, paying not a dime to the copyright owners, nor paying anything to the websites they DDoSed.
inquirerGeneral 3mo ago
[dead]

protimewaster 3mo ago

The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, except their stuff. It's okay to hammer some random website with AI crawlers, ignoring robots.txt, and causing bandwidth costs to skyrocket. But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable.

AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
> But if you cost an AI provider money with your data acquisition practices, well, that's just clearly unacceptable. It's the same question libertarian advocates cannot resolve: If one truly believes in personal sovereignty, how are shared resources paid for, such as roads, power grids, potable water, sewage services, fire departments, and police departments? It is also not a coincidence that leadership in many tech companies have expressed libertarian ideals.
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
  What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? Because they definitely have answers to this question...
  - AdieuToLogic 3mo ago
    > What do you mean by "libertarian advocates cannot resolve"? Like, they have no answers at all, or you aren't personally swayed by them? The latter I suppose. I qualify my answer because what few rational responses I have seen to this question are equivocations at best and thinly veiled myopic sophistry supporting personal greed in general.
    - slopinthebag 3mo ago
      The short answer is that "shared resources" in a libertarian system is a bit of an oxymoron. It's a category error. The long answer would probably be that access to these resources would be gated through pay-per-use, instead of a distributed taxation system. Of course for convenience you might end up with a structured way of purchasing a group of resources and it might even look like a roundabout way of taxation, although libertarians might argue that taxation is the roundabout way. Or they might give a different answer, there are different schools of libertarianism! * not a libertarian, but interested in niche political ideologies
      - rmunn 3mo ago
        Plus, the question of voluntary vs. involuntary comes in. Taxation is, in most forms, involuntary. Don't pay your taxes, eventually you'll either be arrested or the government will compel your bank to hand over what you were supposed to pay; either way you're not allowed to say "I don't plan to use public roads so I don't want to pay for them" or "I don't want my money going to support the military, I'm fine with the military not defending me if the country is ever attacked" or whatever. You have to pay the taxes, and your say in how they get spent is very indirect. The libertarian ideal is voluntary payment for services. Don't want to pay for fire protection? You don't have to; the flip side of the bargain is that if you haven't chosen to pay for fire protection, the fire company is under no obligation to put your house out if it does catch on fire. The choice is yours, but you have to be wiling to accept the consequences of your choice as well. Note that I have not studied the various flavors of libertarian philosophy, so some of them might well disagree with what I just said. But the voluntary/involuntary thing is pretty important to libertarians as far as I know, so it's definitely worth mentioning here.
  - preg_match 3mo ago
    I think the typical answer is “free market” but that answer doesn’t sway because: 1. Nobody bothers to explain why something could function as a free market and 2. Nobody bothers to resolve the plethora of domains that de-facto cannot operate as free markets. So, in that sense, they don’t have answers. “Look over there!” is not an answer. Free markets are actually not a given. We have to build them and build in systems so that they can operate as free markets. How that intersects with healthcare, public utilities, etc is complicated. IME libertarians are reductionist and simple, which is why many people have just taken the route of ignoring their arguments.
    - slopinthebag 3mo ago
      I find this comment a bit odd. There is a ton of literature on the topic, as well as lively debate online. I would recommend both The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman and Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority (specifically pt 2) as great readings on the topic. If one judges any idea by the average discourse on internet forums, especially throwaway comments, and trolling, no idea would ever stand up to scrutiny.
      - preg_match 3mo ago
        I largely agree, but the bigger picture is that free market hand-wavy economics is the status quo. I’m especially critical because, in the west, it’s just accepted as fact. Yes there is reasoning behind specific implementations. But most people don’t know that reasoning. They apply hand-wavy reasoning to fit the status-quo. That, to me, is a problem: one which doesn’t exist in other economic theories by their nature. For alternative theories, it requires active effort and reading, because it’s alternative. What that doesn’t mean is that alternative theories are just magically correct. But what it does mean is that the average person arguing those positions are simply better informed. I’ve mostly just learned to ignore people, both online and in person, when they use the term “free market”. Maybe that’s self-destructive, it probably is. But ultimately I get tired of arguing with people who don’t put in even the first-tier of reasoning into their positions. Never mind second or third order effects.
- walthamstow 3mo ago
  Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? Neither system resolves both problems. Extremist dogma is not a great way to run a society, but it does good numbers on social media, so here we are.
  - gmerc 3mo ago
    Only one is a reasonable problem in functioning societies, the other one mostly a fallacy.
  - dinfinity 3mo ago
    > Libertarians can just flip it round and say how do socialists solve the free rider problem? This is a fallacy (tu quoque/whataboutism). You're changing the subject to distract from the fundamental problem in libertarianism and implying that some other strawman is just as bad. Without solving the fundamental problem, libertarianism will never work for anything but toy societies.
    - walthamstow 3mo ago
      Your spidey sense is failing you, you're making assumptions you've got no ground for. I've voted for left of centre parties all my life. I was born in the NHS and I'll probably die there too.
      - Xunjin 3mo ago
        Tbf I don't think he is implying you are certain political group/view/spectrum. He is just arguing your flip argument.
  - lambdaone 3mo ago
    Democratic socialists and social democrats solve the free rider problem through general taxation and regulation. Consider universal healthcare as the case in point for this; we absorb the cost of chronically ill people by mixing them in with the rest of the population, at a fraction of the price that the "free market" costs to attempt and fail to do the same thing.
MagicMoonlight 3mo ago
[dead]
xdennis 3mo ago
That's one aspect, which is a bit of a gray zone. But Anthropic trained on pirated books. That is explicitly illegal.
- ares623 3mo ago
  I'd love to see an open-source project that's basically a Torrent client for downloading pirated material, but it trains an AI model "in the background" using the downloaded content. That way everyone can claim fair use for possessing copyrighted material, I mean there's precedent right?
  - blourvim 3mo ago
    I am not a lawyer, from what I understand that the precedent is that you can use copyrighted material in ML process. Even though meta has, allegedly, pirated the material, the cost of violation would be pennies compared to the ai spend, since that is the violation, not that they used those materials,
  - freejazz 3mo ago
    They were liable for copying the books in the first place, regardless of whether or not they trained the AI with them. Read the opinion.
- lambdaone 3mo ago
  As I understand it what was "explicitly illegal" was copying the books, in the sense of mere copying before feeding them to the model, and this is what the Anthropic copyright settlement is about. Actually processing them through the model, though, was considered transformative and therefore fair use.
- heroh 3mo ago
  so did Meta for Llama. The entire chat thread and email exchange was exposed in Discovery; apparently Zuck signed off on it. In one of the IM exchanges one of them say ‘everyone is doing it’ https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1879152507865485497?s=20 https://x.com/jason_kint/status/1879152507865485497?s=20
eunos 3mo ago
Anthropic, Dario especially seems have eternal grudge against China as a concept, that remind me of Thiel.
- __rito__ 3mo ago
  Coming from him, I am not sure even that is real. It could very easily (and plausibly) be a part of the ongoing hype drama. "Our models so precious, US Gov has to revoke access to foreigner." - tuned up version: "Our models so advanced our #1 adversary is desperately stealing it from us."
- manojlds 3mo ago
  All a facade no? It's just about regulatory capture.
  - eunos 3mo ago
    I dont think so, Altman seems more likely to play regulatory capture here, but Dario seems having pure and personal hatred.
  - freejazz 3mo ago
    Just overly hubristic
- throwawayffffas 3mo ago
  He has an eternal grudge against anyone filling up his moat.
WarmWash 3mo ago
>The AI companies seem to take the viewpoint that everything on the internet is free, The AI companies? That's been the common ethos of the internet for 40 years I mean, raise your hand if you ad block and have a hard drive of pirated content...

mannanj 3mo ago

there's no honor among thieves.

amanaplanacanal 3mo ago

It's not exactly the same, since any Claude output is public domain under current law. So the Chinese aren't stealing anything here.

tom2026hn 3mo ago

What's yours is mine, and what's mine is still mine.

1f60c 3mo ago

Not really. Data mining for AI is presumably fair use, whereas when you sign up for a Claude account, you enter into a legally binding contract that says you will not distill a model based on its outputs.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
amanaplanacanal 3mo ago
I guess they can try to sue. Good luck.
iAMkenough 3mo ago
“Legally binding” bs that a judge would laugh off.

deaton 3mo ago

Not really even in the same ballpark as what they did. These other labs are using AI generated content (which has already been ruled un-copyrightable) to train their models. Oh and they are paying for those tokens. So at absolute worst, they are violating the terms of service. The horror. Meanwhile these frontier AI labs pirated and scraped everything they possibly could, paying not a dime to the copyright owners, nor paying anything to the websites they DDoSed.

inquirerGeneral 3mo ago

[dead]