> At the end of the day, without having internal logits or original reasoning traces, "distillation" (which suggests one model being derived from another) just seems a very manipulative way of describing this.

Again - you're making things up. The fact is that everyone in the frontier AI lab space and the Chinese AI lab space knows that distilling is extremely effective and far more so than training from scratch. That's why China invests millions of dollars to create networks of tens of thousands of proxy accounts and shell companies to distill American models.

It's a way to steal the R&D budget of another organization/nation-state.

Stop making things up that you know nothing about.

> OK, so it's a terms of service violation - a customer is using Anthropic model outputs to help create something that competes with Anthropic, but that's it.

No, it's stealing the value of the model. Anthropic has spent billions of dollars training their model. They have an R&D investment that anyone who knows how to add numbers understands has to be paid off, and anyone who has taken a basic economics class knows is the foundation for intellectual property: that to keep technological economies functioning, you have to have some sort of protection for technological inventions because they require upfront R&D investments.

> This is why people are calling out the hypocrisy - Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when they appropriate other people's copyright data for training, but Kimi are evil communists when (we assume) they use data generated by Anthropic (not even copyright protected) to help train their own.

This is just whataboutism and emotional manipulation. You can simultaneously believe that Anthropic did a bad thing when they scraped the whole internet and stole every book they could find to train their models, and that distillation is bad.

In fact, anyone with a coherent moral compass would acknowledge that China is worse, because not only would they steal everything that Anthropic did, but they're also distilling other countries' models and they wouldn't even comply with US court cases, as Anthropic is.

> Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when

...and this is just jingoism. Not that I'm surprised, to be honest.

You appear to know nothing about how these models work.

Do you know where the "reasoning summary" that Fable outputs comes from? I bet you're assuming it comes from Fable. Wrong. You can find the truth on Anthropic's web site if you care to look for it. The summary deliberately comes from a smaller weaker model. You're not getting the Terrance Tao level reasoning, you're getting his daughter's summary "daddy did a lot of math", and you are claiming that from this you can train a Terrance Tao level model.

Yes, I understand that Anthropic is upset that there is competition. Perhaps they should have realized that with no moat there was going to be competition and planned accordingly.