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Comment by Certhas

2 days ago

You haven't explained how this is illegal or any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.

As you said yourself: They are buying the product. Then they are using it for their own purposes. That's more than Anthropic/OpenAI did for the open internet. That's more than Meta did when they obtained torrents of books in the early days, and then claimed that even though the data was obtained illegally they can still train on it just fine.

They paid for it! It's absurd to call this espionage!

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Certhas

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tristanj  2 days ago

> They paid for it!

They didn't though. The resellers are not buying via the official API, they're buying Max subscriptions (where tokens are priced ~10x below API cost), then splitting the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output as the regular API. Anthropic prices its subscription plans barely at cost, to bring in customers onto their enterprise plans where they can charge expensive API rates. Reselling these subsidized plans for price arbitrage is a TOS violation. It's not a legitimate purchase. Plus, a non-trivial amount of this volume is funded by stolen credit cards, so this "revenue" gets chargeback anyway.

The resellers then log all the the model output, then sell it to Chinese labs as training data.

> is it any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.

I think you'd acknowledge there's a difference between "We indexed public web pages" and "We deployed tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to resell your subsidized plan for cheap, stealing your own customers, while collecting the data to build our own competing product" are very different actions. One can believe the first was wrong while acknowledging the second is far worse.

  • Certhas  2 days ago

    TOS violations are not espionage. Everybody who links up Claude to OpenCode is violating the TOS.

    So from the largest industrial espionage in history we have left "They paid for the accounts but violated the TOS". And then you randomly add the claim they stole the money to pay for the accounts.

    You have provided no evidence other than "Claude tokens are sold for cheap in China". As others have pointed out, that might also simply be counterfeit tokens generated by open weight models.

    The western labs have established the precedent that all data they can buy beg borrow or steal is fair game. Turning around and crying foul when the Chinese labs follow their lead is hypocrisy.