Competition is supposed to be the safety net of capitalism that ensures high quality and low prices. Distillation is not illegal. They're just using the LLM in a lawful way. So yes we all should thank the capitalist Chinese labs for helping the consumer in a win-win fashion.

This military strategy talk is not interesting to anyone other than Anthropic AI researchers who decide to work there.

This. I find distillation way more ethical than piracy. The U.S. already jumped the gun by making this stuff not copyrightable. We should of instead held these companies liable. It's not like the research they did in the process was for naught. They (U.S. AI companies) could of sourced legal material without stooping to the same lows that China and other nations are willing to go to. All in the name of a buck.

Anyways - I pay for z.ai, Opencode Go, Ollama Cloud. I love me some distilled models.