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Whether or not you find Anthropic's behavior bad, theybhave been very loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models for a while now. This se

• bayindirh 3mo ago
  From my understanding, distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se. Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law, too. So, why all this "effort" to protect the model? This is a free market, and moving fast and breaking things is the norm. If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, maybe they can start by respecting others' IP, so we can start talking about ethics, equality and playing fair.
  • zaphirplane 3mo ago
    > Also, the output of the LLM is public domain by law Why so? Also there is a lot of code in ironically claude and ChatGPT that’s generated by LLM . Yet I haven’t seen the public domain code
    • bayindirh 3mo ago
      See: https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-declines-to-consider-whether-ai-alone-can-create-copyrighted-works https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...
    • danlitt 3mo ago
      The code is not eligible for copyright. If they do not give you a copy of the source code, that does not matter. And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code.
      • skissane 3mo ago
        > And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code. I speculate this could be a real issue in future copyright infringement lawsuits. The plaintiff bears the burden of proving that the code they claim is copyrighted by them actually is copyright. If it is known that large parts of it were generated by LLM, they’d need evidence to demonstrate sufficient human input to establish copyrightability. If they’ve kept highly detailed traces of the development process, that could be rather straightforward; if they haven’t, it could be really difficult. Now, that’s true in the US, which never accepted mere “sweat of the brow” as a basis for copyright; the UK courts have, and most of the Anglosphere follows the UK on this more than the US. The other factor: when dealing with an (almost) trillion dollar corporation, even if you’ll win the legal argument, they may bankrupt you with legal fees before the argument is ever properly heard. But I suspect the precedents on this topic are going to be established by lawsuits involving far smaller actors. (IANAL and I speculate only for myself, not any present, past or future employers.)
      • kalkin 3mo ago
        > The code is not eligible for copyright. This is very much not what the linked case established.
        • plasticeagle 3mo ago
          According to the link: "The US Copyright Office and federal courts require human authorship for copyright protection; works created solely by AI are not eligible for registration under the current rules." The Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to this rule, and so for the moment at least, the rule remains in place. This means that companies leaning heavily into their LLM use may very well find that they do not, under the law at least, actually own any of their code. As I've read elsewhere there's every possibility that AI code will be the asbestos of the Software Engineering world. Something we'll be trying to get rid of for decades, once everyone comes to their senses.
          • actionfromafar 3mo ago
            I think the word "solely" is going to be a tunnel you can drive freight trains through. So with the asbestos analogy, we encase the fibers in resin and call the whole thing copyrighted.
            • usrusr 3mo ago
              Or in other words: there's a big difference between public domain and copyleft and it looks like whoever came up with the asbestos analogy was underestimating that difference.
        • danlitt 3mo ago
          Please explain. That is exactly what the linked case established.
          • kalkin 3mo ago
            It established you can't assign copyright to the LLM itself. That's very different.
  • filoleg 3mo ago
    > distilling the model with another model is not illegal per se. Just because it is legal, that doesn't mean Anthropic wouldn't reasonably want to prevent that from happening (which, from my understanding, isn't illegal either).
    • bayindirh 3mo ago
      I love the asymmetry. When small fish tries to protect itself, big fish hits small fish with "It's not illegal" pole. When small fish points out that what the big fish is crying about is "not illegal", big fish has the right to be above the law to prevent the problem themselves. Having values requires equality. They have lost the right to cry foul when they trained their model with "but it's fair use" card. Life works by reaping what you sow. Now they are at the reaping stage.
      • lmz 3mo ago
        "It's not illegal" is only an argument against lawsuits / law enforcement involvement. Those PoW anti-AI things people put on pages aren't illegal either.
        • bayindirh 3mo ago
          No. From my interactions, I have understood that some people use the same argument to wash their consciences from any guilt. What they do is unethical, but not illegal, and they hide under the same argument to drown the ethical angle. In other words, being honest to oneself is important. Anti-scraping measures people utilize are neither unethical nor illegal. That’s the difference.
          • DrewADesign 3mo ago
            I’m still frequently shocked by the entitlement people feel to other people’s work/ideas/data/bandwidth/server load, to feed a multi-trillion dollar industry. I find the totally cynical “well when you’re making an omelet…” types to be a bit pathetic, but I understand their motivation— they’re simply greedy. But I just can’t understand the genuine indignation about people attempting to limit or stop ingestion of their own work, even if it’s just for the bandwidth costs. Go ingest your own shit.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Philpax 3mo ago
    It's not illegal to distil the traces, but it is also not illegal for them to try to stop it.
    • chii 3mo ago
      Imagine an electricity generating company saying that they don't allow their electricity to be used to cold start a competitor's generator.
      • brookst 3mo ago
        Do you think software should be regulated as a utility?
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
        • bot403 3mo ago
          Software, no. But maybe eventually AI and tokens are a public utility.
        • the_other 3mo ago
          AI probably should be. The bulk of its efficacy comes from the work of “everyone else” (in loose terms). AI also aims/hope/threatens to replace such a large number and range of jobs that it probabky should be a commons.
          • darkwater 3mo ago
            Wise words. And probably in a few years more people will think the same, but now most are blinded by the gold rush or the hate for it.
        • sakisv 3mo ago
          Depends on the software. In this case, the companies that make and provide AI models that are increasingly used to interact with me on critical things (banks, public sector services) then yes. Abso-fucking-lutely they should be regulated like crazy. In fact I'm really surprised by the amount of people that are not worried by how many parts of their lives are being handed over to be managed by a probabilistic system that is controlled by a private company with next to zero oversight. There must be a greater liability than "oops, you're right to push back"
  • anon373839 3mo ago
    > If they are so adamant on protecting their IP, What they are trying to protect doesn't qualify as intellectual property. Only 4 categories of IP exist: (1) copyrights; (2) patents; (3) trade secrets; (4) trademarks. The capabilities embedded in model outputs don't qualify. Machine-generated outputs are ineligible for copyright. They aren't covered by patents. They aren't trade secrets, because the model companies are selling them rather than keeping them secret. And of course, trademarks are conceptually inapplicable. This leaves the model companies with contract law (ToS) which is pretty inept because it can't bind third parties. And technical measures, like the ones being discussed in the article. And, of course, politics. Frankly, I think it's pretty ridiculous to even think that models can be protected from being learned from. I feel the Stanford Alpaca team demolished that idea 3 years ago.
    • eloisius 3mo ago
      The hypocrisy of the pro-AI mega corp arguments makes my head spin. For three years they’ve been using the example of a human reading books and then outputting creative works influenced by them as analogy for training AI on copyrighted works. Now suddenly we’re supposed to not draw the same parallel about a hypothetical person who learned from Claude and is now outputting creative work based on it.
  • stale2002 3mo ago
    > So, why all this "effort" to protect the model? Because it's their model and business and they are free to use the free market to do exactly that? That's their free market rights too. If you don't like it, use another model (which they would be fine with).
    • bayindirh 3mo ago
      > Because it's their model and business and they are free to use the free market to do exactly that? I mean, nothing stops distillers to find better ways to distill, either. Meaningless cat & mouse games. > If you don't like it, use another model (which they would be fine with). Thanks, I use none. It's peaceful this way.
  • CMay 3mo ago
    The usage of the output is probably considered legal. The usage of the service for that purpose may not be, and using it at scale in a dishonest way is not, which is what China has been doing. Countless thousands of separate requests abusing the service (which is not a simple static HTML feed, but an AI service request) for every kind of query to soak up the results. The post is about what's in the local code, but for a long time there has already been modifications made to the request outputs from the major cloud services as they work together to both curb adversarial distillation and to degrade the quality of training China can get from that distillation. It's likely not to make the answer wrong or bad, but to make it so that any model trained on the output would not gain the benefit of the model's reasoning generalization skills as easily and also identifying markers that might even link back to request IDs. The techniques talked about in this post are naive and simplistic, largely because they are released publicly. It's not as much about protecting IP as much as it is about slowing China down or being able to track the effects of abuse. So many people are talking about greedy company this, greedy company that. The world is not made up of caricatured giant money pigs wearing suits with monocles and gold watches. That is a children's view of Marx's exaggeration on free markets. Bad, greedy people do exist, but if that is your only hammer for every nail then you have a problem. The upper-bound for how good these models can be is so crazy that it is essentially dual-use military applicable to an extent most other technologies are not. It's not only cyber attacks or biological weapons. Most people are not even built to understand the possible threats. Why does it matter if China gains those capabilities? I invite you to begin to learn about China's behavior around the world. The CCP is darkside material.
    • bayindirh 3mo ago
      > Why does it matter if China gains those capabilities? I invite you to begin to learn about China's behavior around the world. The CCP is darkside material. Reminds me of this comic: https://xcancel.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888?lang=en https://xcancel.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888?lang=... None of the superpowers in this world is innocent, and like MAD, more countries have the capability, the better. I know some of the things CCP do/did. I know some of the things US does/did. I'm from neither, so I don't take sides. AI's use has been confirmed, or more precisely boasted by two countries in two different wars, and China was not one of these countries. We have seen the effects of "if they don't know them, they can't exploit them" mindset of NSA for years. Keeping information/technology private is neither beneficial, nor possible. It's only a temporary moat-ish gap. Not a definitive solution.
• cowl 3mo ago
  oh no, the company that illegally used every possible media they could get their hands on is crying that some other company is doing something potentially shady but not illegal? And using that excuse to put in place hidden surveillance systems on their customers?
  • next_xibalba 3mo ago
    People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it "illegal".
    • rowanG077 3mo ago
      Right, so it seems that distilling an AI model is legal too then. At least it is somewhat similar.
      • pixl97 3mo ago
        Legal vs "They aren't going to let you do it with their service" are two different things.
        • gtirloni 3mo ago
          Screw those poor copyright holders without the means to stop frontier AI labs, amirite?
          • pixl97 3mo ago
            >Screw those poor copyright holders In general yes. Cut it down to a reasonable amount of time and I'll care a whole lot more about those 'rights' holders.
      • next_xibalba 3mo ago
        It is a violation of their terms of service. There are plenty of good reasons to not use Anthropic's services. If you don't like their terms of service, do stop using them! I personally think Anthropic's increasingly successful attempts at regulatory capture are even more distasteful.
• cowboy_henk 3mo ago
  The obvious response is the realization that spending trillions on training LLMs is not a viable business model if they can be distilled for a much lower cost.
• botfriendsarent 3mo ago
  Sounds suspiciously similar to the "album title", "Steal this album" by system of a down. Im not sure why we are dithering on the boundaries of honesty when the entire content LLMs are trained on is stolen. Are we debating "honor among thieves"? Of course we are not, or maybe we are! Does the behavior of a thief even matter to me? only after they do their time. And they will. I can see the investors perched on the balconies of their condos in a couple years if that. its a long way down.
  • gjvc 3mo ago
    "Steal this book" by Abbie Hoffman
• notnullorvoid 3mo ago
  > loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models for a while now. They would be stating this even if it weren't true, because it fits their marketing. While I don't disbelieve the claim outright, I highly suspect Anthropic is misleading everyone about the severity.
  • ethbr1 3mo ago
    Distillation usage still burnishes usage numbers for IPO... If anything, Anthropic is incentivized to track but do nothing until equity lock up expires.
• rowanG077 3mo ago
  Something about throwing stones in glass houses.
• comfysocks 3mo ago
  > foreign labs Apparently not just foreign labs. It looks like xAI distilled Anthropic models to train grok. https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-outputs-distillation https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-o...
  • munk-a 3mo ago
    That's less of a worry though since xAI is patently incompetent.
    • malfist 3mo ago
      Incompetence is not an excuse for amorality
      • brookst 3mo ago
        Oh that’s ok, xAI is enthusiastically immoral.
      • Laurel1234 3mo ago
        What's amoral about distillation?
    • paradox460 3mo ago
      Except when it comes to image models. Imagine is extremely good and extremely cheap. I've been using it to generate book covers for ebooks (old novel short stories that never had a cover, for example) and it's phenomenal. Each cover is about 6 cents
  • riverbirch 3mo ago
    I wouldn't be surprised
• KoftaBob 3mo ago
  > a mechanism to make that obvious. Say they prove that foreign labs are distilling their models, then what?
• jmward01 3mo ago
  What does that have to do with CC? I'm not commenting on that being good/bad/legal/illegal, but CC is separate from the models. If they really are doing this maliciously it is because they are trying to ignore my 'CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1' flag (if that still means anything).
• caned 3mo ago
  The article seems to state as much minus the obfuscation. However justified they are to respond, this can be a slippery slope. We're bound to hear more reports of hidden user data exfiltration.
• cvadict 3mo ago
  >very loudly stating the foreign labs have been distilling their models Help! Someone else is blatantly ripping off my plagiarism machine!
• pseudosavant 3mo ago
  No sympathy for them trying to “protect” the output of a model that’s trained on data that they didn’t get consent to use. Ripe hypocrisy.
• gmerc 3mo ago
  The have been fucking distilling our websites and writing, even when behind TOS, aggressively bypassing protection mechanisms. They they can fuck right off
• pjerem 3mo ago
  I really doubt other labs are distilling Claude using the Claude Code CLI when they can way more easily use the API directly. I also don’t get why the « protection » on ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL. If I change it to use a Chinese model, the Chinese model will not care at all about the modified prompt. On the contrary, if I’m distillating (which again, using CC CLI would be stupid), I’m not going to change ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL.
• didntknowyou 3mo ago
  i think you're being played by their whole ethical high horse PR angle
• idiotsecant 3mo ago
  Aww man that's rough did someone steal their content and use it to make money without asking them?