Comment by w0m
6 hours ago
> Distillation is NOT an attack.
From the article -
> 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts
wouldn't that be considered an attack? Not sure what I'm missing here.
6 hours ago
> Distillation is NOT an attack.
From the article -
> 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts
wouldn't that be considered an attack? Not sure what I'm missing here.
An attack against what? The sanctity of "their IP" that is itself the result of a massive copyright violation campaign?
Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
In some cases if the model regurgitates the original material then that is clearly copyright violation, but if the model "learns" from the source material just like a human brain would then that's not a copyright violation.
No, what was proved in court was that they downloaded and trained on millions of pirated books. The court said their use of books is fair use, but stealing them isn't.
I think we're going to see cases that find distillation is also fair use. You're using the competing model like a book. You pay for it, you use it (read it), it informs your model, but you aren't repeating/reselling what the model told you verbatim. Foreign labs may still run afoul of competing labs' Terms of Service, and they may also pay a settlement (or not, it's a different jurisdiction after all), but the damage is already done. Distillation will become uncontroversial when done legally.
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Then distillation isn't a violation either by extension.
3 replies →
it's a 'too big to fail' model. Because they have a big swinging dick all the copyright and other restrictions they violated would nuke them from orbit so we can't actually hold them to account for it .... for some fucking reason.
> Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
God I'm so tired of this.
The billion dollar companies have the ability to hire an army of lawyers to DDOS the legal system. They at most pay a slap-on-the-wrist fine as the cost of doing business.
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even if you disregard training costs, pure inference costs are a problem same reason other api have rate limit. this is an attack to bypass the rate limit.
Be careful to properly identify the bad behavior. A customer who buys a product for less money than it cost to produce has not necessarily done anything wrong. They just took advantage of a loss leader. That's on the seller.
Did you notice that when Valve was displeased about scalpers, Valve changed Valve's behavior?
It doesn't seem reasonable to complain that a customer of your AI service received that service for less money than it cost you to provide that service. I don't think that is the complaint here at all. If that was the issue, they could just raise their price.
As most everybody seems to notice, this is just a reenactment of what was once written for comedic effect: "You're trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen!"
Perhaps an arrangement can be reached.
https://clip.cafe/the-princess-bride-1987/youre-trying-kidna...
Still calling it an "attack" feels like a stretch.
They literally had to pay for that "attack", no matter how many accounts they used.
Google was killing many websites for decades with their crawlers. Most large websites decided to create dedicated infrastructure for their traffic alone. Somehow they didn't participate in that cost and were not called the attackers.
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It's merely a ToS violation.
My terms of service are that you are not allowed to breath oxygen.
I am getting a bit tired of companies being able to have user hostile, anticompetitive, monopolistic terms of service. The freedom we give them comes at the cost of the freedom as consumers to have free markets because they lock them up
Exactly, calling it “illicit” is funny. Your ToS isn’t law.
Illicit means maybe against the law but definitely against the rules, for example an illicit affair. The word for against the law is illegal, from Latin, or unlawful, from Germanic. I guess the Germanic cousin of "illicit" would be "forbidden."
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That's violating TOS, spamming, possibly a DDOS, but the distillation in and of itself is not an attack it's just using the model.
Like the difference between scraping a site with one or two active connections vs thousands. It's not the scraping that is an attack, it is how they are going about it
> That's violating TOS, spamming, possibly a DDOS
As in distributed distillation of service?
Just sending a request to a service does not constitute an "attack". It seems that what Anthropic mean by "fraudulent account" is probably just one violating their terms of service - misuse of a subscription account, and/or the presumed nature of what the user was trying to do.
I guess Anthropoic would regard any developer using their subscription plan with OpenCode to be operating a "fraudulent account", maybe an "attacker" too. Now we know how they think of anyone using Claude to develop software competing with Anthropic. Only an "attacker" would want to vibe code their own harness, or god forbid want to learn how to build/train an LLM.
Of course Anthropic's wording is intended to be deliberately provocative, since they are trying to manipulate the US government into shutting down the Chinese competition.
Attack or customer
Is an attempt to copy all or parts of a model an attack, when models have very questionable copyright status? Maybe? I don't think most people have much sympathy here though.
Let’s not forget that by the same logic, Anthropic et al are “attacking” copyright holders all around the world by scraping their data unauthorized for training.
Pot calling kettle black.
Not only that, daily flooding websites with almost infinite amounts of request for ”web searches”. DDoS-by-VC money.
i mean, i got 5 replies in a minute of asking, and none deny it's an "attack", they simply say "good". HN should be better discourse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy