> Copyright law and IP law is not the same although everyone seem to conflate the two.

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.

> Excerpts are often considered fair use, but it depends on country.

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