This happens all the time. The government can decide legislatively that certain commercial terms are simply unenforceable. Making distillation clauses unenforceable in tort law would be straightforward. They can decide what customers they want to have, but they do not have unfettered rights as to the enforceability of terms governing the relationships between the parties.

> Seems only fair

"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!" -- Vizzini

It's pretty common to have such laws. OpenAI can put whatever they want in their ToS, but they cannot go back and sue someone for violating those terms if the government has ruled that clause to be unenforceable.

> OpenAI shouldn't be allowed to decide what types of customers it wants and doesn't want?

Correct. It shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Lots of software licenses have “non-compete” clauses that forbid you from using it to develop a competing product. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was a compiler or two out there with that restriction, most likely niche languages.

let's call it for what it really is, only companies "entitled to legally stolen data, don't steal from us now" are crying about distilation

Fair use requires more than you accessing the material legally.

In the US one of the factors is “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”.

If anthropic Hoovers up the world’s books and trains on them, and then spits them out verbatim on command, then it will clearly impact the value of the work; nobody will buy the original, they’ll just ask Claude.

Others also argue that even if it’s not reproducing it exactly that the training runs afoul of that factor, specifically the “market for” portion. A rights holder can no longer license their book for training of LLMs if Anthropic goes ahead and just trains on it anyway.

The government absolutely can pass laws that ban particular contract previsions. They do that all the time. In your analogy for example while they can require you to wear red, they can't require you to be white.

Governments can do anything they want by passing a new legislation. In your example, they could easily pass a law that states that any ToS cannot reject service to a customer based on the color of their attire. In the USA, it's obviously already illegal for a business to reject service to a customer based on some protected classes like race.

That's just not true. You can absolutely have terms of service that are illegal, and the government can enforce them.

> Previously Anthropic has reported on some Chinese firms doing chicken-shit level of API calls, that at most would be doing some Q and A or final fine tuning

"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."

I don't know why you're trying to downplay it.

European models are so far behind because they don't resort to these tactics on a massive scale. Basically every other country is entirely dependent on 2 countries for frontier AI.

China goes even further lol

https://m.economictimes.com/industry/renewables/china-wto-co...

Which Chinese model was it that identified itself as Claude 15% of the time?

known-good prompt-response pairs are more useful than random semi-coherent texts presumably

You need to do both.

A model trained on all knowledge from the internet (and other sources) is large but ultimately not very useful by itself, because it is going to spit out all kinds of garbage. You have to apply multiple further stages of training and refinement to the base model before putting it in front of users. So as an example you can train a model by yourself and then have GPT or Claude continuously check its outputs and correct it when it is wrong, ending up with a far more powerful model.

Because the model can output data in a manner optimized for training a new model, including outputs that were post-trained like RLHF and RLVR.

This is a silly perspective, inaccurate, and out of bounds framing.

Public libraries, in this instance, is curated data from all the internet, obtained through not legal means (I don't have a problem with this other than lack of attribution, being copy-left). Just to be clear.

But in answer to your incredibly leading and inaccurate framing... they are required (by their job title) to teach to those who who show up in the classroom, it's not their place to discriminate against anyone/thing (even those like itself (other robots)) that also show up in the classroom.

But you can't teach at a university using only knowledge learned from the library. you need a degree. You are free to teach at the park, where anyone can hear you. public in -> public out.

No, but the students that learn and distill what the professor teaches are not obligated to use that information only how the professor wants them to.

'why is reselling stolen stuff bad'

if the professor took all human knowledge, much of which was explicitly not free, and used it to make a for-profit knowledge machine that extrudes unreliable summaries of that knowledge, then yes, being obligated to teach for free would be a fitting punishment.

More like, is a professor who learned from books prohibited from writing his own books on the subject?

1) No one is asking Anthropic to give tokens for free, but at market rates.

2) Any professor who tried to ban students from posting lecture notes online would be immediately mocked.

Who cares, a LLM isn’t a person.

What makes the Internet raw data in a different way? wasn't it mostly worked on by people first?

> Making an LLM from raw data is value-add. > Distillation is just value extract.

There is a value-add in selecting the valuable parts out of the garbage. And let's face it. Largest models contain a lot of garbage.