A) These models are trained by ignoring IP. It is hypocritical and absurd to then try to assert IP over them. And I am for the destruction of IP on all ends.

B) What this essentially means is that the Chinese labs are taking the work of these mega corporations into making it freely accessible to other labs and businesses, to serve inference, fine tune, and host privately on prem. That's clearly a good thing for competition in the market as a whole.

C) I don't see why we should have to duplicate the massive energy and infrastructure investment of building foundation models over and over forever just because we want to preserve the IP rights of a few companies. That seems a shame and it seems better to me for everything to learn from everything else for the whole ecosystem to get better by topping each other and building off each other; that's also why publishing research into the architecture and training of these models is so much better than what the proprietary labs do (keeping everything a secret), although tbf Anthropic's interpretability research is cool.

D) these Chinese models give 90% of the performance of frontier proprietary models at a 10th or 20th of the cost. That seems like a win for everyone. Not to mention the fact that this distilling also allows them to make much smaller local models that everyone can run. This is a win for actual democratization, decentralization, and accessibility for the little guy.

MiniMax, DeepSeek, and Moonshot are all releasing models for the public to use for free.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google ect have been scraping information to train their models that they had no right in scraping yet when these company pay them to scrap data we are suppose to be worried?

Labs like Anthropic always preach we are trying to build AI for everyone while releasing expensive models that are closed source.

The only reason AI is affordable at all is because of these Chinese AI labs.

What I didn't know is that the three groups mentioned "created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models." There's some irony in that, given that Anthropic and all other established AI shops have been criticized for using copyrighted materials without permission to train their own models. I wouldn't be shocked if we subsequently find out tat every major AI shop has secretly engaged in distillation at some point in the past.

Still, wow, 24,000 accounts. I can't help but wonder, how many other AI shops have surreptitious accounts with other AI shops right now?

If I think of the number of lessons and educational conversations that a human would have to acquire their lifetime knowledge, I would hazard to say that AI-to-AI learning no longer requires many orders of magnitude beyond that.

If anything, it’s thanks to these Chinese labs that I’m able to have something like glm-5 for 7$ quarterly or kimi k2.5 for 2$ month, while getting results close to Claude. I am grateful. Looking forward to the new Deepseek model.

But one thing that makes me curious is how, lets say, Deepseek is doing this. Are they paying cheap workers to buy subscriptions and chat to gather data? Have they purchased lots of api keys and using automated scripts to feed Claude data and collect the output? How are they doing this?

Then another lab comes, and "steals" from you - that beautiful, refined dataoil - by distilling your weights using inferior equipment but with a toolbox of ingenuity and low-level hacking tricks. They reach 90% of your performance at 20x cost reduction.

What happens when another lab distills from the distilled lab?

Who is the thief? How far will the Alice go?

No jailbreak or funny business needed.

Whatever your stance on how copyright should apply to AI and legality of training on copyrighted materials or distillation, it's clear Anthropic has no moral high ground here:

* either distillation and training are fair game, in which case it shouldn't complain

* or they're not, in which case it's involved in massive IP theft

Complaining DeepSeek ripped you off, but then self-reporting as DeepSeek, is some major hypocrisy.

* Likely they will seek regulation that would ban some models. Not sure this can work, but they will certainly try.

* Likely they will not release some of their next models in the API.

https://x.com/saquib0509/status/2026085877219549305?s=46

https://x.com/fbsloxbt/status/2026028440759996432?s=46

Mind you that nuclear weapons are able to be regulated not because the tech itself is secret, it is because the refining is nation state effort, that is impossible to go unnoticed.

Realistically, the more tokens they are selling, the harder they can control it

Also actually, we all sort of knew this but its interesting to see Anthropic call out such companies in public.

I think that for providing models at 1/20th the cost and open sourcing it while sometimes being much more leaner is an overall win for most part for the general public whose data was questionably stolen by Anthropic and it seems that some court cases about these are still happening.

One of the more curious things I want to say is that Qwen and GLM 5 (Z.ai) are not in this.

Personally I love Kimi the most and maybe we will see in the future from more AI tech companies like chatgpt/google too if they have any proof of distillations as well.

But the fact that Z.ai isn't distilling makes me wonder what and how they are doing it. Qwen models although nice are not the best at the moment so I especially wonder what Z.ai model training does and where they get their training data.

I still love Kimi and I would probably use Kimi but I am interested to know more about the training sources of Z.ai

Also another point but given that Kimi and Qwen are quite tightly linked (Kimi aka moonshotAI is backed by Alibaba aka Qwen) [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/19/alibaba-backed-startup-moons...]

And qwen not being in here. Why didn't Qwen also share the data. Or could there be a fact where Kimi/moonshot trained on anthropic and also shared the data with Qwen/Alibaba too but the name of Qwen wasn't available in public ofc?

I can definitely see that being a possibility given that Kimi/Moonshot uses servers hosted on alibaba.

Interestingly for Z.ai I found a quick fact about them from Wikipedia:

In May 2024, the Saudi Arabian finance firm Prosperity7 Ventures, LLC participated in a USD $400 million financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately 3 billion USD.

I want to know if z.ai does any large scale web scraping? Where does z.ai get from what I see 15T–28.5T tokens.

I saw this comment from an article:

Pre-training: On a 23T token dataset curated from diverse sources, with emphasis on high-quality data through techniques like SemDeDup and quality-tiered up-sampling.

I think I am interested in this rabbit-hole because if Anthropic has caught them. This will definitely impact the companies in future if Anthropic models get better and they might have to figure out the training data issue which Z.ai might've solved?

I am still extremely suspicious of Z.ai but perhaps someone who has the tech reach on twitter or any other platform (maybe simonw?) could ask them.

I think Z.ai guys are really open people especially within the research community yet I don't think I remember hearing about them intensively scraping as well while we consistently see posts about how American or even Chinese (Baidu most notoriously iirc) who basically DDOS a server/git-server etc.

What are the Z.ai team doing that they don't distill Anthropic, they don't create intensive scraping problems at the same time while still getting good quality data? Does seem to be too good to be true unless I am missing something which I think might be. So if anyone has the expertise, I would love to know more.

I hope so, I don't need their "safeguards".

Oh ok, so you can steal from everyone, but when they do it to you, its bad.

  [x] <s>Anthropic</s> Cursor built a broken browser from scratch by distilling and wrapping Webkit
  Lyrics: Whatever happened to... the boy that I once knew?

  [x] Anthropic built a broken C compiler from scratch by distilling GCC 
  Lyrics: The boy who said he'd be true...

  [x] Anthropic was distilled
  Lyrics: Oh, no, oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no

Hilarious.

What exactly makes these accounts ^fraudulent^ ...did they not pay Anthropic for the service ?

Of course they don't want anyone else to use the precious outputs from the model they created by scraping data from the millions of fleshbag programmers they're now trying to put out of a job. They're just another corporation with the standard goal of making as much money as possible with little regard for anything else, so that much is expected.

But to actually write up a public announcement like this, loudly and proudly announcing to the world that they're crying at the daycare because their precious toy has been stolen by some kid, even though everyone around them knows they themselves originally stole that toy from another kid too, takes a special kind of corporate shamelessness that seems to be becoming more prevalent by the day.