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  0xbadcafebee
  There's two basic kinds of distillation: 1) the massive [and dumb] method where you ask a question and use the answer as reinforcement (Black Box), and 2) more targeted distillation where you use one model to directly inform/train/guide another model (RLAIF).The latter is basically fine-tuning the model with direction from another model. Thousands of businesses do this every day to fine-tune. This is almost certainly what the Chinese labs are doing, since it has a much better effect on the end result than just getting simple answers to simple questions.These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is, because they want the USG to block/ban Chinese model providers as protectionism. They have already called for more export controls on chips (which is funny because DeepSeek v4 was designed to run on Huawei chips and now the other Chinese providers are following suit). But they can't come right out and say that, so their claim is that they're asking for more export controls because distilled models might not be as safe as their own. But if you show them a jailbreak of their model that bypasses their safety, they'll tell you that any model can eventually be jailbroken so don't worry about safety.
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  tristanj
  Here's what is happening:Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing them to operate below cost.Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China. You need to use a VPN to access either, and you can't pay with a Chinese bank card. So most people who want access to Claude buy access via a reseller. It's the easiest and cheapest way to access Anthropic models in China.These resellers operate tens of thousands of bot accounts, which is also why Anthropic introduced identity verification, to slow down the onslaught of bots.Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 at a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?provider=AnthropicThis is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them.I shared this story a few months back, but it never got any traction. It explains the token resale economy in China, it's an excellent read https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
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  walrus01
  Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgement to the work done by Xerox on the Alto and Star operating system."you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!"Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
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  AdieuToLogic
  The hypocrisy of Anthropic complaining about "illicitly extracting its Claude AI model capabilities" and supporting the White House's accusation of China "stealing U.S. AI labs' intellectual property on an industrial scale" is hilarious.Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, et al trained their models by ignoring the rights of copyright holders when harvesting whatever content they could. Now one of them is crying foul for another entity doing exactly what they all did?Hilarious.
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  fjdjshsh
  >The strike by Alibaba is described as a "distillation" effort, which Anthropic has said involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.Claude used TB of content without permission to train their model and it was ok for them. Now someone else uses the output of a Claude model to train model and they cry foul.
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  tasuki
  > The strike by Alibaba is described as a "distillation" effort, which Anthropic has said involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.I don't see what's wrong about this.> Anthropic said the campaign was conducted between April 22 and June 5, 2026, and generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts.What makes the accounts fraudulent? If they have paid the agreed price, surely it's fine? If they haven't paid, why did Anthropic provide them service?
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  drillsteps5
  I'm looking forward to the trial where Anthropic will have to disclose sources of their training data, and then explain why they are entitled to charging customers for using regurgitated training data but Alibaba which trains their models on Anthropic's models are not.Should be fun.Edit: clarification
• AndreasMoeller
  Unless you own stock in Anthropic, this is a good thing right?
• chvid
  Unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, companies like DeepSeek, Alibaba, z.ai open source their models which allows for true model to model distillation rather what you can do when the model is only accessed via an API with its reasoning chain hidden away.What Alibaba is doing is that they are tuning and training their models based on usage data from someone accessing Anthropic's models; in Anthropic's terms of service that usage data does not belong to the end-user but to Anthropic and they are trying to elevate this breach of their tos to a national security issue.To me the battle between open source and closed source AI is literally a battle between good and evil.Between a dark future where computing is centralized, surveilled and controlled by one or two entities. And a lighter future where computing is de-centralized, principally in the hands of end-users, who are ultimately free to understand, tinker and build what they want.While I appreciate the freedom and wealth of the west; on this point we are clearly heading down the wrong path.
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  amazingamazing
  Distillation is fundamentally impossible to protect against. All you can do is slow them down. Change my view.Eventually these Chinese companies will release some extension like Honey, which will sit on top real, non-Chinese clients and send everything to China anyway.It's over.
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  guybedo
  This is a bit ironic, Anthropic complaining about a competitor using claude data to build its own product when Anthropic basically used all of human knowledge production to build claude, i don't think they paid every magazine, author, journalist, etc ...This is almost standard practice in any competitive industry anyways. Disassemble your competitor's product, study it and try to reproduce / improve.
• exabrial
  I like Anthropic's models, use them regularly. However, it weighs on my mind that there is quite the irony of an LLM company complaining about someone stealing their stuff or using it in a way they don't like. The training data for these models is a massive gray area that they are hoping people seem to just forget about and move on.That being all said, Anthropic seems to be a good company, I'd work for them, but they probably need to help themselves out of the spotlight. A little too much press coverage as of late.
• bandrami
  Oh wow it must suck to have an LLM creator rip off your IP for their own gain
• cush
  It’s hard to see how distillation is any different than how these models were created in the first place - siphoning up all human knowledge without consent, credit, or compensation
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  a34729t
  You know what? We should all get Claude Max subscriptions and max them out hard and post our full conversations on codeberg, as an open training set.
• gmerc
  Evergreen, really, Anthropic's desperate screaming for government protection, aka pulling up the ladder after them. Nothing short of disconnecting global markets will work because the incentives are just too damn delicioushttps://georgzoeller.com/blog/posts/us-ai-labs-love-the-ai-r...
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  randomboy3423
  A partly insider on this.I think Anthropic is just marketing / bluffing, because they don't even have the data.They do distill the models, but they don't go to Anthropic, they just use platforms like aws bedrock, there are too many restrictions on Anthropic's own platform.
• paxys
  Repeatedly warn everyone that your models are so good they will wreck cybersecurity.Complain/brag that chinese firms are illegally using the models and bypassing export controls.Be surprised when your model gets banned by the government.
• ycui7
  in a few more months, when Chinese model gets to Mythos capacity and Fable still locked down. What Anthropic will say? Why can they just admit they are not the only people who know how to train an LLM model.
• democracy
  thats brilliant - "we gonna take your job away from you, please start using our tools", "we stole the content to sell you, and now we are getting robbed, please feel sorry for us", what's next?
• neves
  So said the guys who "extracted" knowledge from all pirated books
• PeterStuer
  The whole investment/valuation model of AI companies is based on "winner takes all", aka a monopoly. This nescessitates regulatory capture and lawfare.Anthropic has been advocating openly for pulling up the drawbridge, ending competition and ending progress.They will continue to lobby for restricting your access. If the Mythos/Fable restrictions would have come in after their IPO, they would have danced with joy aa this defacto has them achieve their goal after unloading the mountain of debt from the institutional onto the retail investor.As it stands, they are set up to be aquired by Google, Apple, Amazon, SpaceX or Microsoft or any other 3 letter agency good boy for cheap.
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  zakkl
  It sounds like Anthropic is eagerly trying to show to USG that they are willing to heavily monitor ‘foreign adversaries’ on their platforms.This combined with no implementation of KYC makes it seem like they want to find a middle ground with Fable where its off of export controls but they promise to prevent China and specific others from using.
• _fzslm
  Anthropic being pissed enough to announce this means that, despite encrypting their reasoning chains, it doesn't matter – distillation lives on.Sweeeeeeeet.
• rw2
  This is making the case for Anthropic KYC for US citizens. No one would allow their accounts to do this if they were on the hook for it from the US government.
• watutalkinbout
  An AI company stealing intellectual property?!Oh, the inhumanity!
• budududuroiu
  Has anyone else noticed that Deepseek v4 running in Claude Code will try to read, list, tail as many files/logs/... as it can for even the most simple tasks?
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  thadk
  Does anyone have hints on what kinds of prompts are most used for a distillation like this—SWE-Bench sorts of things?Is reconstructing the compressed knowledge in the model like reconstructing a lossy JPG or MP3 a reasonable analogy?
• digitaltrees
  Call the wambulance a company that stole all of humanities public data to train a model is mad that someone used their model to train another model.Give me a break. Every employee of anthropic is going to have $20m or more at the IPO.I found out today that an employee of the home care agency I own is homeless. We are trying to figure out how to help her but it's shockingly common in the industry and there are limited resources to solve the reality of working homelessness.
• asadm
  is there a good recipe or guide on doing a successful distillation these days?
• anabis
  Incentive is for users in general to release sessions (sans PII, credentials) so all AI get better and there is alternatives. Even if China didn't do this, I don't see frontier labs being able to charge premium over others for long. RSI maybe?
• grayhatter
  Oh no, someone is profiting of the work of others?!anyways...
• seydor
  It's not fair when others do it.
• anon
  undefined
• c0rruptbytes
  if they’re paying for the tokens, what’s the problem
• uberex
  Hey, Alanis Morissette, this one is ironic.
• Groxx
  Perhaps this is related to the "Mythos is too dangerous and cannot be exported" movements? It'd be a fairly effective way to justify extreme actions in combating it.One could even wonder if they requested it, as a tactic to support their eventual IPO valuation.Which is part of the problem of such an obviously-corrupt government: conspiracy theories are somewhat reasonable, as they keep getting validated.
• pyrale
  Did Alibaba procure tons of stuff from Anthropic without paying, and use it to train a model?I don't see the issue. Didn't Anthropic train on our data, which it acquired illegally?
• 20k
  it sure sucks when people steal your hard work for free without paying for it doesn't it anthropic
• NDlurker
  I don't see what the problem is. They found a loophole and exploited it. Good for them.
• awkwabear
  Wait so they're upset that people used their IP to train a model without their consent or paying them anything?or is this just about the token reselling?
• anhtudev
  People prefer Chinese models to US models. Looks like it is a counterattack.
• dolebirchwood
  Good. I'm glad. Keep it up, China. Loving my cheap GLM and DeepSeek.
• nicman23
  fucking lol. it is always funny when companies use opensource and other free for non commercial use - and plain old piracy - and then cry about the same practices.
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  tonyoconnell
  The narrative is moving towards KYC
• anon
  undefined
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  gaiagraphia
  A company which got rich on extracting the world's content is complaining that another company has extracted their work?!LOL!Get a grip, son.
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  BigTTYGothGF
  If you're an AI booster surely you'd think this was a good thing as it means more models are available in more places to more people more easily. I'm exactly the opposite, and I think this is a good thing because I want Anthropic to suffer.
• zb3
  If true then Alibaba is doing us a public service, good job, I hope this extraction was successful.
• dainiusse
  I am sorry, but companies doing biggest IP theft in history have no moral right to complain here.
• OtomotO
  Karma truly is a bitch
• truthbe
  How do I donate my logs
• yogthos
  So let me get this straight, a company which built its whole business on ignoring IP is all of a sudden upset that somebody is not respecting their IP?
• ece
  It's hard to sympathize with Anthropic for this or the export ban, the hype over model capabilities probably fuels both things (in some ways). Training data for me, but not for thee (at any scale) doesn't seem like a tenable position. If anything, Claude's constitutional outputs should be trained on more rather than less.
• toss1
  Nevermind government edicts & bans -- this seems like reason enough for them to require Know Their Customers, require ID, and shut of certain nations.Failing to have done so seems to have allowed 25000 fake Chinese accounts to walk off with their product...OFC I wouldn't trust the Chinese enough to ack their models the time of day, but Anthropic seems to have allowed far more ... yikes
• asasidh
  People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Anthropic keeps throwing stones every few weeks.
• krembo
  Similar to improving an independent search engine by scraping Google search results and learning from it. Shady but legit
• leentee
  What I get from this is frontier model capabilities are being stagnant.
• jrflowers
  I like that they use “illicit” and “fraudulent” like as if model distillation is illegal and giving them money and then doing whatever they want with the output of their publicly accessible models (which Anthropic does not own) is… also illegal?“Anthropic, red faced after unattended ice cream cone eaten by ants on park bench, once again demands government pick it as forever winner, adds ‘no take backsies’”
• ProAm
  Says the company that is involved in the largest copyright heists of all time to build it's product.
• stego-tech
  I'm sorry, but I can't stop laughing at an AI company crying about theft of their IP.
• andai
  We have Claude at home!
• secretslol
  Another day, another excuse as to why Fable 5 was pulled. Just waiting for Anthropic saying the Persona partnership was the fault of the Chinese.
• guluarte
  Anthropic training their models full of copyright data, so?
• lossolo
  > Meanwhile, on June 12, two days after Anthropic sent the letter, the Commerce Department imposed controversial restrictions on Anthropic's latest Mythos and Fable AI models because officials feared they could be deployed by military intelligence users in China and other countries of concern.So that was the real reason for the Fable restriction? Because Anthropic wrote a letter to the US government saying that China was distilling Fable?
• 8note
  so what? anthropic stole this functionality from everyone else
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  rvz
  Notice how Anthropic is now scapegoating Chinese models providers like Alibaba and outright accusing them of distilling their models.Whether if it is true or not, this is part of their effort into using them as an example to scare everyone into getting congress to ban powerful models from being accessed outside of the US and also banning powerful local models from being released.Anthropic does not care about you, and they are not your friends.
• KennyBlanken
  willy wonka oh-go-on-dot-gifGosh, overusing accounts running up unplanned-for expenses?Kinda reminds me of...overusage charges and inflated expenses clients have had to deal with because Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok, etc have been "illicitly extracting" everything they can grab from said websites, as fast as they can. In what amounts to a DDOS, frankly.
• bridgettegraham
  lol. good for the chinese. I hope their models get better than the closed american ones quick so we can stop using "controlled" models.
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  Pxtl
  "You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!"
• youknownothing
  laughs in ironic
• JasonHEIN
  we now know what to use when Fable is too dangerous !
• johnwheeler
  Well, of course they did. Are you kidding?
• watwut
  How dare they! Only we should be illicitely extracting everything others done!/Anthropic-probably
• yashthakker
  [flagged]
• ElenaDaibunny
  [dead]
• z0ltan
  [dead]
• Mr_Xpes
  [flagged]
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  TheAceOfHearts
  Someone should setup a plugin or something for Claude Code that makes it easy to log all inputs and outputs for people who are willing and interested in sharing their usage. I don't want Anthropic to be the only company that can train on my usage, I want to share my usage so it can be used for training all new models.Once you have a system for collecting all logs, you just need a place where they can be submitted. Ideally it would be a freely licensed dataset that is publicly available for everyone.Has anyone built this yet?