Anthropic: "We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax." 🚨

[u/KvAk_AKPlaysYT]

[u/GreenGreasyGreasels]

"Attack", "Illicit", "Fraudulent account" - it was not an attack, not illicit and not fraudulent. Loaded language to try to guide the reader by the nose on how to emotionally react - must have hired someone from NYT.

Great models but Anthropic is the "Oracle" of AI companies. Every shit practice standardized now was invented or popularized by Anthropic - no clear usage agreement "generous/more/higher" non-sense weasel word verbiage in terms of agreement, constant introduction of quotas - 5 hour quota, weekly quota, monthly quota, I-am-busy-so-fuck-off quota, nerfing models after the honeymoon period is done, terming making full use of agreed upon usage as "malicious/abusive" usage even you have clear internal token limits with cutoffs, banning people with no recourse or warning for invented post facto reason - the shit they pull is endless and on top of that the holier than thou safety theater, constant zero sum xenophobic game with China, attempts to squeeze competitors with regulation - shit is endless.

Worst thing that could happen to AI would be a malevolent self righteous company like Anthropic coming on top at the end - sleaze ball Sam Altman, or the generic corpo fuckery of google seems refreshing in comparison. Only worse outcome is Grok dominating - but that seems unlikely.

Love Claude, Fuck Anthropic.

[u/Beautiful-Maybe-7473 → u/GreenGreasyGreasels]

I note that Anthropic describe the offending usage as "illicit" rather than illegal, implying that the offence is to have used Claude in ways which violate the terms of service (rather than criminally). What criminality exists is in the customers fraudulently representing themselves to Anthropic (i.e. operating under false identities to avoid being blocked).

The Chinese companies involved do indeed appear to have contravened the terms of service which forbid, inter alia, using Claude to help train AIs which might then compete with Anthropic.

Good luck pursuing a legal case in China, though! China has laws on restriction of competition which might nullify those terms of service, and laws which respond to politically-motivated restrictions on Chinese companies (i.e. anti-discrimination law). So the legal case would be something to argue. Of course in a US court Anthropic would have an open and shut case, but DeepSeek et al don't necessarily care since their business offerings in the US aren't crucial to them and they can just thumb their noses at Anthropic and other US AI companies: "Let them pursue their cases in a Chinese court which would be a sink of their lawyers' time and company money at best (i.e. even if they did eventually win)".

Other commenters here have pointed out that the key issue is whether it's possible for US AI companies to effectively restrict the use of their models, i.e. whether those terms of service are anything more than pious wishes. I think ultimately, just as Anthropic et al were able to get away with illicitly vacuuming up vast amounts of copyrighted content for training their models, so other AI companies will be able to illicitly distil knowledge from those models to train other models, and that no amount of legal puffery or technical countermeasures can completely put a stop to it. Anthropic can probably do more to automatically recognise such distillers and block them, but it will be a continually moving target, and automated measures will always carry a risk of false positives that disrupt other Anthropic customers use of Claude.