6 ms·

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 thi

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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
    > The code is not eligible for copyright. This is very much not what the linked case established.
    - plasticeagle 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
      Please explain. That is exactly what the linked case established.
      - kalkin 4mo ago
        It established you can't assign copyright to the LLM itself. That's very different.
filoleg 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
[deleted]
Philpax 4mo ago
It's not illegal to distil the traces, but it is also not illegal for them to try to stop it.
- chii 4mo 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 4mo ago
    Do you think software should be regulated as a utility?
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - bot403 4mo ago
      Software, no. But maybe eventually AI and tokens are a public utility.
    - the_other 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.

zaphirplane 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
  > The code is not eligible for copyright. This is very much not what the linked case established.
  - plasticeagle 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
    Please explain. That is exactly what the linked case established.
    - kalkin 4mo ago
      It established you can't assign copyright to the LLM itself. That's very different.

filoleg 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago

[deleted]

Philpax 4mo ago

It's not illegal to distil the traces, but it is also not illegal for them to try to stop it.

chii 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Do you think software should be regulated as a utility?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - bot403 4mo ago
    Software, no. But maybe eventually AI and tokens are a public utility.
  - the_other 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.