also China actually legally pays the API costs even when distilling. OPenAI and ANtro just straight up abused scraping bots which overloaded servers

What China does is: buy accounts or API inference, often through shady methods, and then resell it at a cost/small profit/small loss (access to advanced AI models is often restricted for users in China, so there's a demand for region lock bypasses) - while saving all the traffic between the real AI users and the AI platform for future analysis, including distillation.

Being an "AI inference middleman" is pretty lucrative, and AI companies have only started to crack down on it.

They are scraping too, and don't follow copyright any more thoroughly (less if you count all the licensing openai, anth are doing now)