> Well there were observed cases of Claude calling itself Deepseek or Qwen. So pot calling the kettle black?

There are open-source Deepseek and Qwen models - "distilling" doesn't involve breaking terms of service or hitting an API because you can literally run local inference or even just inspect the weights directly, and that's intended because they're open source.

It's categorically different for a nation-state to build massive illicit networks of fraudulent identities to do distillation over tens of thousands of accounts to intentionally bypass providers' terms of service, intention for their models, and business model that very explicitly proprietary and not open source.

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

If Claude did distill on proprietary PRC LLMs - then fine, shame on them - I condemn that and I expect others to do the same. But there are no open-source Claude models. The only way for PRC models to have those responses is if they distilled Anthropic's models from their APIs.

> To be fair I find it hard to take this too seriously, shouldn’t it be trivial to just replace “Claude” with any other string in your “distillation” dataset?

...and what would happen when it read all of the books and articles about Anthropic and replaced "replaced Claude Opus" with "replaced Qwen Opus"? Did you give any thought to this at all before saying it?

> It's categorically

The fraud part and using stolen accounts or credit cards or blatantly violating the terms and conditions (i.e. reselling subscriptions not using outputs in certain ways somebody might not like) is indeed categorically different.

Using uncopyrightable outputs of an AI model obtained legitimately to train your model is not inherently interlinked with any of those things. I don’t really see how the model being proprietary or “open” is particularly relevant when talking about the outputs.

Even using the word “distilling” in this case is deceptive and biased. It implies that the Chinese are somehow stealing Anthropic’s models or their weights and somehow directly transforming them into new models. That’s certainly not what’s happening in any direct sense.

e.g. what if I agreed to send all my Claude code session files to Deepseek or whoever? There would be nothing wrong about that since I and not Anthropic own those files and can do whatever I want with them. Using certain different ways to obtain them of course could be highly illegal.