If this was a regular topic on an American company so blatantly violating user data and lying, people would be pissed.

Unfortunately, hacker news is being so heavily astroturfed that I counted dozens of comments just justifying this behavior appearing very quickly as this post appeared on the front page, together with its position being clearly suppressed.

I'm sure AI corps have violated some IP laws here 'n there. Did not one guy die while he was trying to blow the whistle on this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji

(sorry for the thinfoil hat remark)

Like with all the tricks Meta played... Maybe somewhere deep down Moonshot's EULA is says that they are allowed to "proxy from time to time for research purposes". Then it's legal right? /s

Intended to be publicly accessible internet content, I have no problem with.

But are you ignoring the literal scanning (and 'burning down' of books) that Anthropic has been found guilty of? Or the torrenting of pirated content en-masse by Meta that there is an active lawsuit over to name just 2 recent examples?

Look at the image and audio/video models especially - they can reproduce everything from Mickey Mouse (the copyrighted one) to making entire Seinfeld episodes with the real cast (both visual likeness and even the actor's voices).

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> they seem to be buying physical copies and scanning. Seems legit, that's what a human would do to learn from a book

There’s still the open question on learn vs copy/mimic/repeat.

As a human, I can read a book I bought. I’m definitely not allowed to scan it and post its pages online and upload them to an archive of scanned PDFs without the authors’ and publishers’ permission.

IIRC the Meta legal case wasn’t even about LLMs, they just torrented and shared pirated files, whether with strangers or among employees. Those may or may not have been later used for training, but it was already illegal to just share among employees.

There really isn't any moral argument against distillation, which is itself pretty goddamn benign. It's pretty simple. Someone pays for Claude access. Claude outputs tokens that are not copyrighted. Then you train on those tokens, which doesn't create a derivative work in the first place.

Is it theft? Well, no. There's no authentication bypass here, no Claude model leak. At best it is violating the terms of use, kind of like how it is violating the terms of use to scrape many websites that AI scrapers scraped.

Is it immoral? Why would it be, exactly? Distillation is not a forbidden technique with moral implications. In fact, there is quite compelling evidence that Anthropic themselves were distilling from OpenAI in early Claude models. It helped them bootstrap if nothing else. There is no special moral code that makes distillation forbidden any more than training off of people's works without permission, or even express non-consent, is forbidden.

Really the more concerning aspect of this is the deception of using Kimi and expecting Kimi output and getting Claude instead, but I would like some independent confirmation that this is even something Moonshot really did before raking them over the coals, rather than just assuming it's true because Anthropic said so. How exactly did they figure out, considering ZDR? It deserves more information.

I do agree that there is a tendency for people to justify CCP human rights violations by trying to equate them to much lesser but similarly shaped transgressions from Western governments, but that's an unrelated issue entirely. The story regarding distillation is consistent: Sorry, but I can't afford enough tiny violins to express my lack of giving a shit. I harbor no ill will, I truly hope the golden parachutes that Sam and Dario fly out on are adorned with the finest materials.

While many things might be legal (or hasn't been ruled clearly illegal yet) /under different jurisdictions, we are still in the process of figuring out what we accept as ethical. As the output of models can't be easily copyrighted, destillation is equally disputed. Particularly if the primary model interaction was not destillation (as in this case) IMHO it will be legally quite difficult to restrict secondary use for training. In the end we have to find a legislation and probably even international treaties that account for the fact that classical copyright is beginning to become an obsolete concept.

Just because the material was legally required doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it. I can't (legally) buy a physical book, scan it, and put the scan on my web site. It seems to me that an LLM is a derived work of the training materials that went into it, and thus needs permission from the copyright holders.

But OK, the law seems to disagree with me there. But OK, let's say it's fine for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted content as long as they didn't torrent it or whatever. What then makes it illegal, or morally wrong, to do the same thing with their competitors' model outputs? Why is it OK for Anthropic to scrape this comment and feed it into their system, but not OK for Moonshot to scrape the output of Anthropic's system and feed it into theirs?

If American AI labs can learn from the open web why can't Chinese AI labs learn from American ones?? The argument is that learning and distillation are transformative and legal, is it not?? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Notably, those are the consumer terms. The commercial terms [1] are much stricter about what Anthropic can do. That's one of the main draws of the Team plans over the individual plans (in addition to a couple dashboards, shared skills, etc). And as you mention, you can go even stricter as an enterprise customer with a zero-data retention agreement.

If Moonshot is using thousands of accounts through some proxy service those are most likely consumer accounts governed by the weaker ToS

1: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms

I'm aware of that language in the terms, but I think most of us were under the (likely mistaken) impression that the safety review flagging focused on harmful content and safety (e.g., individuals discussing threatened real-world violence), not "safety" of Anthropic's intellectual property. And that it would likely result in retention of a handful of a customer's interactions, not all of them.

If the criteria for retention justifiable as safety at Anthropic are cast very broadly in actual practice, then it opens cans of worms for a lot of customers in complying with privacy regimes, customer IP protection, etc. It also raises the question of whether at least some subset of customers from certain geos (e.g., China likely, but perhaps other geos) may just automatically have everything flagged for retention, despite the terms, based on collective abuse risk flagging of their geo.

While ZDR is available, it's not available to all types of customers and is priced at a higher tier. Undoubtedly though this may be a wakeup call to some customers who didn't realize they may need ZDR to get on the ZDR bandwagon.

I haven't seen evidence of this. Care to link?

They probably have no choice because they're not allowed to pay for its use. If they were allowed to pay for a Claude or Codex subscription, they probably would.

Also, it is essential for the model's responses to be without censorship. In reality, responses sent to China by flagship models are known to be weaker.

Violating terms of use is not illegal.