Comment by tristanj
16 hours ago
1) The situation you described would be covered under the contract between Anthropic and xAI, and that any violation of that would be subject to financial penalties and legal proceedings. The US has a robust corporate legal system, and disputes do get resolved through the court system, although in a slow and costly manner.
The contract can stipulate a penalty at a high enough amount to discourage this behavior.
2) Output from models & intra-datacenter communications can be encrypted if customers truly cared.
3) There is no reason do this, because there are far better ways to exfiltrate data from Anthropic models. Chinese companies are already doing this at an industrial scale where they are reselling Claude tokens for 10-20% of the cost while retaining the data to train their own models. https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
If we look at Deepseek V4-pro, created by Deepseek who Anthropic formally accused of harvesting Claude tokens at scale, it performs the same as Claude did 6 months prior.
> The US has a robust corporate legal system
Thanks for the chuckle. ;)
It's an accurate statement. The US (specifically Delaware) has a world-class corporate law system. Delaware has a court dedicated to only corporate and commercial disputes, with 200+ years of case law.
It does, though.
It does until you're embedded enough with the surveillance system [1]. If a company was able to get immunity in the wat AT&T got it, no contract would protect the other side.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
1 reply →
> There is no reason do this, because there are far better ways to exfiltrate data from Anthropic models. Chinese companies are already doing this at an industrial scale where they are reselling Claude tokens for 10-20% of the cost while retaining the data to train their own models.
I think you missed the part where Anthropic stopped displaying their thinking tokens over the past few months, and instead now provides “summarized thinking”, letting Haiku summarize Opus’ thoughts.
So it is now much more difficult (impossible?) to distill the models.
I also think you over-estimate how well the legal systems works in the US nowadays, and under-estimate just how much power Elon has in the government.
At this scale thinking tokens don't matter anymore.
In Feb Anthropic called out three Chinese labs for "distillation attacks", but a lab missing in their post actually had most Claude generated tokens among all Chinese labs in their midtrain data :p
Incidentally, Claude started the "Summarized Thinking" bullshit around a year ago.
Deepseek kept its pace of improvement nonetheless.
I guess there's a reason why those Chinese companies are in china
I hope the Chinese keep harvesting Claude etc. since they stole all their data anyway, who cares?