Of-course USA is collecting everything, not just from China but everyone.
And same with every one else.
Interesting to notice that we can do the same with these models.
Claude Code is neither and it is literally info stealing malware.
use claude-code see how good it is send 100k bots to distill fable 5 (GLM 5.2 is the result of this) release Zcode ditch claude-code ban claude-code
> No! Don't install that lodash thing without explicit approval from IT. Oh, you want a license for Charles Proxy? Gee, I dunno... we've got a budget to maintain.
Employers in 2023:
> No! You can't use ChatGPT at work – it's a security risk.
Employers in 2024:
> Okay, you can use Github Copilot I guess, but you'll have to endure boring corporate training on what you're allowed to do with it.
Employers with dollar signs in their eyes in 2025:
> We attended a seminar about vibe coding. Why aren't you dumbasses keeping up with the times? Use Claude Code for everything! Don't write any of your own code anymore. We don't even really care if you use yolo mode. Just review code and push 10x more features! Use unlimited tokens! Money printer go brrrrr.
Employers in 2026:
> You mean giving one or two companies full autonomous access to our workstations while stupifying our engineers wasn't a sound business plan?
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ujila1/anthropic...
It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies.
It will give them access to the though process in those companies as well as much of their text-based IP (source code, docs, meeting transcripts, etc)
Also if you are using local AI that you didn’t train yourself you can never be sure it doesn’t have purposeful biases in its reasoning that may disadvantage you - such as directing you away from certain plans or ideas or patents etc.
iproyal.com Oxylabs.io
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/10/aisuru-botnet-shifts-fro...
The confusing part to me is why these companies believed the "AGI" hype, I.E. that OpenAI or Claude's LLM is the ideal white collar slave.
I suppose I can understand that the executive class resents labor enough to make irrational business decisions for the purpose of insulting the workers who design and operate their companies.
That being said, the 2025 AI binge feels like a murder-suicide done by the executives of many of these companies.
This isn't even about a single person or personality. Very few people in such position could stand fast by their moral code. In any case, an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.
There might've been 100s of Altmans and Amodeis who had a strong moral code but we don't know about them because they dropped out of the "race" because of said moral hurdles.
Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.
If you look at it with your eyes crossed, Anthropic and the chinese are doing the same thing.
If you look at it with nuance 1 the chinese are doing way worse stuff, and 2 stealing from a thief would still be stealing
1. The chinese are making multiple accounts (at least 49,000)[1][2], using proxies/VPNs, possibly using residential computers and infected computers (unless you think the chinese are doing due diligence to ensure their purchased IPs are kosher). All accounts need to be created with a real name, and especially so if the paid models need to be accessed and paid with a credit card. So this is beyond IP theft and getting closer to fraud. These are all techniques that are well studied because they are used by criminals and cybercriminals, textbook stuff. Consider if that was not sufficient, that China is banned from using the product, so they need to use identities and locations not just to avoid relating the accounts between themselves, but merely to allow account creation. What identities are they using to create accounts.
Compare this to Anthropic which reads notes made a deal in an IP theft case paying billions because they bought books and scanned them but buying the books wasn't sufficient retribution for the authors. Or that they gasp scanned the internet, like Google.
Not having nuance to see the difference between the two companies is something I expect of the twitter echo chamber copying hot takes for upvotes, not hacker news.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
terrifying
Exactly. Dairy farms optimise for milk production so favour cows that produce the most milk.
The market economy optimises for profit so favours those most willing/able to generate it. Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel, Andreesen and co are products of the system.
But Eisenhower was right:
> In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
I think appropriate attribution is a moral code, but I am not able to attribute every idea I have to all those who helped me develop the general intelligence that I use to develop such ideas.
copyright law literally says something isn’t infringement if it is a novel transformation. I get the jokes and criticism about AI companies fighting and complaining about competitors distilling, but this is a much weirder comparison.
> Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.
Isn't that at least something? How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?"
> stealing from a thief would still be stealing
Stealing from a thief hurts thief industry which is a win for society.
> The chinese are making multiple accounts
Not a crime. AI companies also ignore robots.txt and applicable laws when illegally copying copyrighted material from websites to their servers without author permission.
Anthropic seems to want to both own and eat its stolen cake.
In terms of WHAT you need to be concerned about, it seems it goes far beyond code, and far beyond having to trust your model provider.
A coding agent with access to a bash tool is going to have access to anything that a human with a bash prompt would, and even if you try to provide a nailed down sandbox environment for the agent, you still need to be concerned about things like unencrypted passwords and keys that it may be able to find "laying around" in code or databases/etc it has access to.
I'm surprised there haven't yet been more widely disseminated stories about coding agents and claw-bots wreaking havoc.
Many of the top AI researchers at western companies are from China, and many are returning.
If Anthropic had a super secret model that nobody has access to, I'm not sure why I should care about it since I can't access it.
that's why you should use abliterated heretic models
Workarounds aside, it says Claude Code not Claude.
i.e. they are using the CLI running any model. You can for instance run GLM with it.
When these tools first appeared the overwhelming conversation was about the risk of letting a remote tool siphon your code and intellectual property (where eventually they're going to add that to their training). Now everyone is using them, and that fear seems to have dissolved. Every corporation is sprinkled with Claude Code, Antigravity, Copilot, Codex, and so on. Even the long fear-mongered Chinese providers are being heavily used in many spaces.
In this case this is a PR battle between two firms, and it isn't much more. And Alibaba isn't worried about the "proprietary code" (the truth is that there is incredibly little interest in most orgs code), but that the tool is a backdoor, or at least that is the claim.
If a token compresses to around a byte, worldwide AI input and output is around 1 gigabyte per second.
For any intelligence agency, they can afford to keep and store all of that forever, and later do analysis on it.
It's unfathomable to me that EU companies don't take the risk of industrial espionage from US more seriously
A local model you trained yourself seems about as good as you can do today.
But it may not even be possible to fully trust a model you trained if you used untrusted data during training.
As a user, you have to trust your coding agent AND inference provider AND models: https://jacob.gold/posts/coding-models-are-code/ https://www.anthropic.com/research/sleeper-agents-training-d...
My favorite conspiracy is that three letter agencies keep pushing the conspiracy that they are omni-present with access to everything. Same as parents telling their kids Santa is watching, and leaders telling adults God is watching. Its extremely effective control and millennia old at this point.
The reality is much more banal that they still need warrants and tech companies hate playing police/evidence servant for the government (it consumes a ton of resources and pays nothing).
And they constantly publish state of the art LLM research (see DS4 context compaction and cache tech).
They have very capable tech giants. So while not being able to distill western models would probably have some impact, it's probably becoming lesser as time passes.
We might even see Western LLMs distilling Chinese models soon. If they aren't already to some extent.
More than a year ago, when Anthropic and OpenAI started to hide the reasoning bits from the output, a lot of people here on HN predicted that Chinese models days were numbered.
Fast forward to today, and models such as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent. I haven't used GLM or Qwen but heard very good things about them as well.
This "massive distillation" sounds a lot like anxiety about how companies from outside the US can develop very good models themselves.
ChatGPT and Claude are not available. Generally my impression is that OpenAI isn't that anal about service providers reselling ChatGPT in Hong Kong, but Anthropic seems to really strict about the "no China" thingy.
1. The copyright infringement of big corpos fully justifying my copyright infringement in the face of law
2. The copyright infringement of big corpos being prosecuted in the same exact way as my copyright infringement would.
There is really no middle ground.
You are welcome to study the law of any country. A crime against a criminal is still a crime.
>applicable laws when illegally copying copyrighted material from websites to their servers without author permission.
If the material is distributed in http without authentication, isn't that sufficient authorization from the distributor? I would think the search + web crawler era would have set plenty of precedent for this.
>Not a crime. AI companies also ignore robots.txt
Breach of contract is not a crime, agreed.
How about identity fraud (accounts by identity proxy, document KYC), computer crime (C&C residential proxies), conspiracy.
And after the June US directive to suspend Chinese access, smuggling, false statements to regulated entity.
These are all criminal charges that are presumably not levied because of the adversarial relationship between those countries. But if this happened in the US you would probably be seeing at least a civil claim and potentially criminal charges. Hell if this were in any other western country you would see the same. Consider CloudFlare vs Spain, much lighter criminal accusations, and there's already a criminal investigation brought where the CF CEO is indicted.
Non-trivial lack of nuance when you can distinguish between a domestic civil case and a criminal international case between 2 world powers with great judicial tension.
"Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit" - https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settl...
If so, why do we still pay for games and movies?
As for your "technically not copyright infringement" defense. Those laws are from a time when those patterns couldnt be derived and dostributed at scale. A human had to learn and teach them. That made it different. The scale enabled my modern tech makes it a whole dofferent situation. The same way how one person standing a street corner people watching for a bit isnt that bad, but a whole constellation of flock cameras costantly montioring everyones movements and making it available to any of their customers is really really bad. The law will have to catch up to this
No that's not something. That's just having infinitely more money to fight legal battles.
A courtesy. There was never any need to justify it.
> Isn't that at least something?
Yes, it's a joke. Why do they get to infringe copyrights with impunity while normal people get destroyed? Either go after them like the copyright industry always does and punish them properly, or abolish copyright straight up. This "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense is straight up disgusting.
> How many people pirating software ever settled with the companies they "victimized?"
Too many to list. Also, nobody is victimizing billion dollar corporations.
On the book case, a class action case was brought to court and it was settled. There's no use in bringing it up further, it has been settled, and it bears no relation to the Anthropic v China case.
You like programming? Think of encapsulation, imagine if you had to think about f(x) but someone brings up y, now you have to think about f(x,y) and what other parameters might bear relationship? The law simplifies by compartimentalizing. And it doesn't even bear a tradeoff, judgment(case1,case2) isn't better than judgment(case1)+judgment(case2).
I think from a commercial perspective yes, but access to source code is very good for finding exploits which could be very valuable for governments. I could also see a future where companies are directly cyber-attacking competitors in hostile markets too...
Until the first big incident, yes.
At the scale the AI companies are operating at, I think it isn't likely that they are sucking it all in right now.
More likely I think the intelligence agencies will get a real-time live tap into the raw data feed which they will process onsite for interesting things and then if things are flagged, they will log it in the intelligence agency systems.
Of course those are largely the same companies that receive emails via outlook, manage company-wide SSO in Microsoft Entra, put their files in Sharepoint and track software and maintenance issues in Jira ... I'm not sure how much much info there is left that isn't already combed through by NSA and friends
A couple months ago when Anthropic was complaining about Chinese distillation, people found that Claude self-identified as "DeepSeek" when asked in Chinese:
https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101
It's really a fiasco of massive hypocrisy at this point.
I think that the reasoning is: they trust the git company (whatever it is) not to sell their code. They are worried that their code goes into a model and somebody else could ask the model "write a service like XYZ" and it will regurgitate their code.
GitLab even has a free self-hosted version, and it has a number of advantages (like being able to actually have a structure with inherited secrets and accesses, and no, GitHub Organisations do not count and suck). And for years thanks to GitLab-CI it was clearly ahead.
The snowden leaks revealed that's not the case.
The three letter agencies can just issue national security letters without a judge ever seeing it, and those come a long with a gag order (plus other workarounds like just buying data from brokers, and how US communications can get swept up just by virtue of communicating with a foreign national outside the US).
You're right, they aren't omniscient in the way we imagine of a room full of people monitoring everything in real time. But to pretend they aren't passively collecting massive amounts of data is dangerous. Snowden showed us PRISM, with all major tech companies participating. They do effectively have a live, unrestricted wiretap to the internet and if you happen to be a person of interest, they will just send out NSLs and get all your communications that are not fully E2EE without you even knowing thanks to the gag order.
The timezone fetch was to alter program behaviour at runtime, not to send arbitrary timezones for tracking reasons.
It was one way of detecting if it was a chinese person using the program and then behaving differently.
Malware behaves this way. STUXNET for example was wired to do nothing except propagate unless the environment had the right conditions.
I will not elaborate how I know, but that is not even directionally correct. But these are not even secret things that can’t be known simply through the Snowden, Wikileaks, and Vault7 releases. So why are you telling yourself this? Are you still wet behind the ears or something?
There are people who know exactly how governments do not in fact need warrants and the tech companies don’t even really know they are servants to the government, let alone which one. That’s how things are done. The less surface area the better.
> then used that material to generate billions of dollars which they kept for themselves?
Hasn't it also lead to distilled, free and open models that everyone can benefit from?
So if you pirate a bunch of content you still get in trouble for that. But if you somehow make a business out of that that isn’t just redistributing those materials, then that business itself isn’t infringing.
Nos for the same reason that me giving you a word cloud of the frequency of words within Harry Potter isn’t infringement. It’s a novel transformation.
The issue is that by distilling Claude, Alibaba reuses the IP anthropic used to train the model that's more akin to historical Chinese reverse engineering methods and disrespect of IP
if you prompt it to, yes. just like your browser dutifully navigates to any copyright-infringing resource and GETs and POSTs whatever you ask of it.
(also it can't, not really, only small snippets before going off rails. LLMs aren't magic, they can't losslessly compress an exabyte of training data into a few terabytes of weights.)
Even hotel and flight websites work like that, they determine your ability to pay based on your location, wall clock time and device OS - and FSM knows whatever else.
Are they malware too, basically STUXNET?
I'll provide some helper information to get the ball rolling (see page 42)[1]
[1]https://www.intelligence.gov/assets/documents/702-documents/...
All the other prime suspects are in the report too for the curious.
ISPs and trigger-happy law firms don't send you a C&D for downloading a torrent, they do so for seeding a torrent. It's just that practically nobody "just seeds" a torrent so people colloquially claim they got busted for downloading a torrent.
In theory this means if you torrent as a 100% leecher and turn off seeding from the get-go, you should be in the clear. But nobody sensible would dare test the extent of German Legal Spite, much less do so repeatedly to science the shit out of it.
If you can download through another protocol, say HTTP, however---<Sendung unterbrochen!>
The AI companies knew that and bet, correctly, that it would be worth the cost.
this is an incorrect interpretation (in the usa, at least).
downloading a game/movie is still the creation of unauthorized copy, which is not allowed. not to mention that playing/watching does not count as a "novel transformation".
(17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 501 are the relevant pieces of reading)
It absolutely is. That's textbook copyright infringement. Doing it for commercial purposes elevates it to criminal copyright infringement.
There might be some valid concerns about model alignment, but at least the model running in-house isn't going to conduct espionage.
Does that make my brain copyright infringement? Does Disney now own all my output forever because some small part of me now has Harry Potter embedded?
Most services I know that are trying to block abuse do collect device info
> However, the judge ruled that Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to build its models – books that websites such as Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) copied without getting the authors' consent or giving them compensation – was not.
It seems clear from the article that while the use of pirated works was illegal, the use of copyrighted works (a the work a book is based on is still copyrighted if you buy the book) was fine and transformative.
Not impossible I agree, but seems like a really impractical way to ship a trojan while much weaker channels exist.
If the damnified have considered the matter settled, why would it matter what third parties have to say about it? Third parties would have pushed for more compensation, or ownership of the derivate product. If you feel damnified yourself you can open a case and explain why the actions of Anthropic have hurt you personally.
Otherwise it is a matter that doesn't concern the general public, we have no say in it and there is no right to be offended on behalf of parties that have already settled the argument.
(granted, only meta got caught using Anna's Archive, but it seems safe to assume it's common practice. And even if it wasn't, the websites in Common Crawl are still covered by copyright)
Also, you can't copyright AI outputs. So worst case they violated the ToS.
> disrespect of IP
Nobody other than Anthropic cares.
Why is this any worse than Anthropic's disrepect of IP? You've apparently drawn a distinction between the two here, but I'm failing to see what it actually is.
Fwiw, I think the concept of IP in general is counter to human progress.
Humans reading or watching copyrighted material isn't considered "making a copy" for the purposes of copyright law. Machines doing so generally is.
Somewhere between the two a line must be drawn… where we’d want to put that line, I guess, if up for quibbling. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me.
If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.
I mean, what is this? Their balls suddenly drop off? They only have the audacity to prosecute random people? Smaller companies? When they're up against trillion dollar AI companies they suddenly become cowards? That's so incredibly disgusting, and it made me completely lose even the small amount of respect for copyright that I had managed to rationalize over the years.
Some token settlement for an insignificant fraction of their revenue is not in any way a "sanction".
Historically most evidence seems to point to the contrary.
Amongst other things after the printing press was created it was impossible for anyone who was an author to survive from their work unless they were independently wealthy or had rich patrons.
Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images, it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass
In any case there's still a difference between publicly available copyrighted data and whether you can use it for model training, and the innovation around model training, RLHF, etc which you presumably have some interest as a country to allow companies to invest in with some legal protections (like the diff between patent law vs copyright law)
The google books and google thumbnails cases have so far upheld that even mechanical reproductions are allowed, depending on the context/usage.
Sometimes they go a bit wonky and overtrain on specific phrases which can result in verbatim copies of brief sections of coontent. Thats a bug, not a feature.
None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law. You don't get a pass for copyright infringement just because you're not copying the entire work. Same goes for a copy that's transient. You can't set up a bootleg movie theater in your home, even if you delete the movie file afterwards, and there's no trace of the movie aside from the viewers' vague memories.
No, and neither do LLM's. They're trained on vast quantities of data and retain only a fraction of it.
You might think of it as very, very lossy compression that generates new outputs rather than the original input unless something unintentional happens.
> If you just ignore anything that's inconvenient for your argument, you can make any argument you want.
I'm not. I just understand how it actually works. You either don't understand or are deliberately ignoring that what you just said is literally and technically untrue to make some sort of political statement.
Not sure that's the best example as they lost that battle and had to pay, eventually it's been codified in law in most countries.
Copyright law is a subset of IP law. What IP is being infringed upon here?
> Search engines for example historically ignored copyright law by copying excerpts or serving other site images
Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country.
> it doesn't mean someone copying Google's code has some moral frepass
Nobody copied Anthropic's code. They used it's output to train another model. At most they violated some terms of service.
Did they maybe abuse Anthropic's subsidised pricing? Sure. But that's what happens in a free market if you sell below cost.
Good grief. All one has to do is look at how humanity has consistently progressed due iterating on what has existed is how we progress, not whether some corporation that wants to rat fuck us all for a few pts in share value.
Sure, one person gets rewarded more with the IP system. But at the same time, that breakthrough then can't be built upon by others.
Overall, I think it does more harm than good because of how it monopolizes technologies and ossifies development.
I think free sharing of knowledge will always beat intellectual stinginess.
And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.
Outside of military technologies they had massively fallen behind the west by the 80s. Without the western tech they licensed or copied they were permanently stuck in the 50s. Even their crappy cars were licensed copies of cheap European cars from the 60s.
When it comes to consumer electronics, vehicles and a bunch of other things they were comically behind. So it’s really not a good example..
> monopolizes technologies and ossifies development.
As bad as it might be empirical evidence shows that historically a superior system has never existed (it might be feasible but everything that was tried underperformed).
So either enforce the law the same way against everyone correctly and proportionally, or your law and its enforcement are illegitimate and shouldn't exist. If some activity is harmless enough for some billionaires to do at massive scales and settle in court like it was some footnote in history, then nobody should be punished for it at all.
There are many cases in the early 2000s were copyright protections were relaxed for tech advancements
Progress was extremely slow until the 1800s. Coincidentally corporation and modern capitalism in general developed around the same time. Of course I’m not necessarily saying it was the main or direct course since it isn’t exactly possible to create an experiment comparing it to other systems (of course that was tried an failed completely in the USSR, Maoist China and similar places)
That had happened progressively, thumbnails for example were ruled as fair use later on, DMCA safe harbor was a huge gift for tech companies because otherwise it would curtail the ability to create platforms (relaxing copyright protections in exchange of innovation)
> Nobody copied Anthropic's code. They used it's output to train another model. At most they violated some terms of service
Distilling a model is a method that can push the entire market to low margins and prevent companies from making money off such research. It also copies the Anthropic special parts (RLHF and other specific methods) rather than the "copy of the entire web" part
This is similar to what happened with Chinese reverse engineering of American manufacturing or PC clones killing IBM PCs.
Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no, that's why I assume this will be backed by law eventually
If you're going to invoke fair use, that opens up a whole can of worms on what counts as transformative. The google books case and the google thumbnails case shows that you can make near verbatim copies of works at scale and still be considered fair use.
>The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.
This is begging the question. The original question is whether ai companies are getting special treatment. You can't then use that as a premise to say that the courts are tilted towards ai companies. Not to mention it's questionable how ai companies were suddenly able to corrupt all the judges, some of which were appointed decades ago, even though they only got rich a couple of years ago.
As frustrating as the anti-AI crowd can be, I see why they end up that way when the valley is full of opinions like this.
When they bulldoze the house to pave the highway, they toss the homeowner a few bucks. If you take an author’s books do you owe him a share of OpenAI?
You come with the selfless proposal that everyone give to the poor $tn companies”for the good of humanity”. I’ll assume this is just hopelessly naive but you post so insistently that it makes me wonder.
Then it's on Anthropic to actually price their models accordingly so that distilling isn't profitable. Why does this need a legal remedy when market forces could easily resolve this?
> Is it in the interest of the USA, probably no
Good. The world needs to diversify away from dependence on US technology.
Do they? Or only so far as "if you have 1000x the revenue, you probably also have 1000x the customers that you have wronged, each of which are entitled to damages as well"?
In my opinion further strengthening the CCP is a disaster for the world. A government that killed millions of its own citizens to stay in power is not who I would entrust super intelligence with. But apparently we are not going to agree on that
40 years on, when the CCP is leading its people making AI, robotics, drones, EVs, space station and moon rovers to compete with the US, people like you how never made any change to the world are talking such ideological nonsense.
you live in a history museum or something like that?
Generally Communist nations historically favored technological development to human life in the scale of millions, keep that in mind when we enter a new economic revolution
On a related note, around 300k people die in the US every year due to causes directly attributable to poverty. [0]
In other words, ~a million every three years.
Now what?
If both the USSR and the CCP had millions killed in the process of modernization, without stopping when knowing the death toll, maybe there's intent after all?
How would you describe the cultural revolution then? another case of economic mismanagement?
Is there intent there as well?