The weights themselves aren't stolen. The claim is that Chinese companies are using VPNs and proxies to buy massive amounts of Claude Pro and Codex subscription accounts, and then selling usage on those subscriptions as cheap white-label LLM API usage.

While selling that LLM API usage, they then capture all the prompts, outputs, and intermediate thinking the LLM does, and then sell those logs to the companies making open-weight models. The open-weight model developers then train on those logs to 'distill' a model.

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jumpkick 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The parent I replied to said frontier weights were “being stolen” which is not the literal case. I think precision is important here.

	▲	eigenspace 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree. That's why I said that the weights were not being stolen, and then explained what is actually being done.

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singingtoday 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fantastic, thank you for the explanation!

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ForHackernews 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

...good for them?

We used to call that competition.

Imagine making this argument with a straight face in any other industry:

"The claim is that Japanese car companies are buying Ford vehicles, and then leasing them to American consumers at cut-rate prices. In return for the cheap cars, the customers are letting the Japanese observe their driving behavior, studying how they use their F-150 and then the Japanese car companies are applying that data to design new vehicles that will directly replace Ford!"

	▲	eigenspace 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I wasn't arguing against the practice, I was clarifying that the weights of these models are not being stolen, and explaining what these companies do to create their models.
	▲	petilon 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> observe their driving behavior That's not what they are observing, it is the behavior of the engines.