They are thieves the same way Anthropic or OpenAI are thieves. Either it’s fair use to learn from this data or not.

If what Anthropic/OpenAi did for training is theft then the Chinese models also are a form of theft. If they didn’t steal then I don’t think the Chinese firms did either.

Following that logic anyone using an LLM trained on “stolen” data for any purpose whatsoever is engaging in theft. Assuming the Chinese companies are obtaining their traces legitimately (which is a different question) what they are engaging in is morally no different than what the overwhelming majority of people on this site are regularly doing.