I do agree that two wrongs don't make a right, the terms of service generally gives cooperation the power to sever the contract, but it does not make things illegal in the literal sense. The illegality usually comes from widescale fraud which includes accessing services you are banned from accessing.

When I said "Does this matter?" I specially meant that distillation in itself, the data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.

And what I explicitely pointed out that focusing so much on distillation is an attack on open research and claiming that the majority of advancements are thanks to US labs which is simply not true (at least not anymore this was somewhat true during deepseek R1 era), but that in itself was inspired by open research.

> How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.

Because anthropic would be the first ones to make that information public and the architecture is unique to kimi... They made it, they wrote papers on it, it's their research.

P.S. none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen, the one about circumventing distillation protection might hold up in court although unlikely.

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smeeth 4 days ago | parent [-]

> The illegality usually comes from widescale fraud which includes accessing services you are banned from accessing.

Agree, and this is exactly what Anthropic is alleging.

> data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.

It's important to note this is NOT what happened. Anthropic was able to trace data directly back to employees at the company: "We attributed the campaign through request metadata, which matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff."

> none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen

There is a lot of work showing Kimi models produce similar outputs to Anthropic models, which constitutes trade information. This is not dissimilar to past and ongoing IP suits against Anthropic and OpenAI by showing the models would recreate images of Mickey Mouse/NYT articles etc.

For the record, I'm a researcher myself and I'm well aware how competent the researchers are at the open-source labs/how much they've contributed. But that's not at issue here, my disagreement with you is specific to your arguments about legality; you're conflating what you think should be legal with what actually is legal.

	▲	himata4113 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is mostly just to reiterate myself as the original question was "Does this matter?" Everything else is simply justifying why it shouldn't, the specifics don't really matter as there is no legal framework to stop china from continuing to distill models and anthropic has proven they cannot use software solutions to stop it either as distillation is still a problem. But I do still believe it wouldn't hold up in court either way as stopping companies from generating training data which was trained on the entire human knowledge corpus is just stealing from thieves and making it 'open' once again so the argument only gets weaker. edit: to add, the mickey mouse / nyc was because anthropic trained on LICENSED works, not apple to oranges. The original work it was reciting was licensed and not licensed BY anthropic.
	▲	asadotzler 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What precedents can you cite and specific examples of their applicability. That is, what would Anthropic's lawyers take to court? You can't say because there's nothing there that couldn't be ripped apart by the least legally capable community known to man, HN. That's why no lab has succeeded in a suit anything like what you're claiming could happen. The only reason Anthropic or any other lab would pursue this is political or commercial. They're either looking for help from officials or they're trying to establish a particular market position.