> If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.
No, because legality should be determined by what's in the best interests of Athropic and OpenAI's business models.
Hopefully they're working on RLHF their models to insert clauses making that reality clear into any legislation their models generate or review. That way it's only a matter of time until the confusion is cleared up.
I suppose model distillation is technically legal, in terms of copyright, because LLM output is automatically public domain.
It's only "illegal" from a standpoint of breach of contract given its against the terms of use/service, which is to say its not illegal at all, there's no criminality there.
Yeah I considered whether I should use the term "illegal" in my original post, but in this case, I believe these models are actually banned for use in China, right? Like there are probably export controls (at least with the NVidia chips)
I honestly don't know ... yeah if it's just technically a terms of use violation (which isn't illegal, just a violation of one company's rules, for which Anthropic has every right to stop), or do we now have export controls applied from the various government actions, etc making them truly illegal now.
we have global export controls on Fable/Mythos, and I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that other frontier models are illegal for a US company to provide to China. So Anthropic geoblocks it, but unlike Mythos/Fable, non US citizens can still use Opus, etc just not from within China.
But because of the public domain status of LLM output (in the US) I'm not sure paying someone to run a bunch of prompts through Claude, post the output on a public website and then have a lab in China pull that output, would run afoul of any laws I think that would be legal on technicality. AFAIK Anthropic has no ban in its terms of use that you can't share Claude's output publicly. You still need interactivity for distillation, but I don't think (for now) there's anything stopping a Chinese or other lab from sending people to the US, signing up for a Claude subscription and doing the work state side.
Distillation is pretty much impossible to stop. The US GOV would have to go the full export controls route like they did for Fable/Mythos to stop any non-US citizen from using/accessing the model, which is going to be impractical if not impossible to enforce.
> If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.
No, because legality should be determined by what's in the best interests of Athropic and OpenAI's business models.
Hopefully they're working on RLHF their models to insert clauses making that reality clear into any legislation their models generate or review. That way it's only a matter of time until the confusion is cleared up.
I suppose model distillation is technically legal, in terms of copyright, because LLM output is automatically public domain.
It's only "illegal" from a standpoint of breach of contract given its against the terms of use/service, which is to say its not illegal at all, there's no criminality there.
Yeah I considered whether I should use the term "illegal" in my original post, but in this case, I believe these models are actually banned for use in China, right? Like there are probably export controls (at least with the NVidia chips)
I honestly don't know ... yeah if it's just technically a terms of use violation (which isn't illegal, just a violation of one company's rules, for which Anthropic has every right to stop), or do we now have export controls applied from the various government actions, etc making them truly illegal now.
we have global export controls on Fable/Mythos, and I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that other frontier models are illegal for a US company to provide to China. So Anthropic geoblocks it, but unlike Mythos/Fable, non US citizens can still use Opus, etc just not from within China.
But because of the public domain status of LLM output (in the US) I'm not sure paying someone to run a bunch of prompts through Claude, post the output on a public website and then have a lab in China pull that output, would run afoul of any laws I think that would be legal on technicality. AFAIK Anthropic has no ban in its terms of use that you can't share Claude's output publicly. You still need interactivity for distillation, but I don't think (for now) there's anything stopping a Chinese or other lab from sending people to the US, signing up for a Claude subscription and doing the work state side.
Distillation is pretty much impossible to stop. The US GOV would have to go the full export controls route like they did for Fable/Mythos to stop any non-US citizen from using/accessing the model, which is going to be impractical if not impossible to enforce.