A bit off-topic from the core of the post, but:

> At Anthropic we’re committed to cracking down on industrial-scale distillation through our own practices, including identifying and banning accounts that use our models in this way. This is challenging—for instance, the relevant accounts can often only be identified after substantial distillation has occurred, and distillation often involves creating large numbers of fake accounts that form a moving target. The practices of any individual company cannot entirely solve the problem, which is why we have called for policy on this issue.

One thing I've never really understood is what sort of policy could possibly deter or hamper Chinese labs' distillation efforts. The only thing I can imagine is some sort of strict KYC regulation applied to all models above a certain threshold, which seems both painful for the broader US AI ecosystem and bound to fail anyways.

I'd guess that's it, some kind of enforceable KYC. They'd only serve tokens to entities with a legally liable ID (as in, someone to sue, that would cost the defendant something nontrivial beyond a burner account or whatever.)

KYC hinders Anthropic's growth and Anthropic wants growth for IPO

so Anthropic's ask is for US gov to ban open weight models so that its growth (and IPO) is not affected