> Anthropic said it identified a campaign by DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude AI platform to improve their own models
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.
Opus said to me once without any poking at it something like, "Help Grok understand it better". Makes me wonder if they are all cross-pollinated to an extent.
Prompt: Hello! Introduce yourself in one sentence.
Response: Hello! I'm *ChatGPT*, an AI assistant developed by OpenAI, dedicated to answering questions, providing information, and helping solve various problems. How can I help you?
"illicit" is throwing shade, but Anthropic can decide not to answer those questions if they don't want to. Plenty of companies don't sell to their competitors
This doesn't at all change the irony of big AI labs complaining about Chinese startups stealing the labs' IP, essentially by scraping the responses.
HN has a higher proportion of AI promoters than AI skeptics, and for a good while, the default response to complaints from book authors, bloggers, and other content creators was that "you put it on the internet so it's fair game", or "it's no different from a human learning from your works". So yeah, unless we're willing to revise these answers, I think the same "tough luck" reasoning should apply here.
For folks who are at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google, and think it's fundamentally different, I would ask you to think long and hard about that answer.
Completely agreed. I would go further and say that it should be legal to scrape responses from LLMs to train new LLMs, and that forbidding that in your ToS should be considered an illegal contract. That’s simply the best way to avoid complete monopolization of the space, without requiring more drastic measures like antitrust down the line (which we seem to not manage well these days, given the number of monopolies). As long as you pay for your tokens like anyone else, "Big LLM" shouldn’t be allowed to control what you use the output for.
In many countries, if a contract contains illegal clauses (i.e. requirements that are inconsistent with the law or public policy), that contract is considered void and unenforceable. It depends on "how illegal" each statement is, whether only that part of the contract is considered void, or the contract as a whole.
One extreme example would be that if I wrote a contract requiring you to become my literal slave if you didn’t pay your subscription on time, you would in practice suffer no consequences from not paying, because the contract itself is illegal in most jurisdictions. A less extreme example would be that where I live (Northern Europe), I can sign a contract saying that I waive my right to sue the company I purchase a service from, and then sue them anyway because it’s my right by law and asking me to waive my rights is an illegal contract. Or that where I live, non-compete clauses in employment contracts are illegal unless you offer 100% salary throughout the non-compete timeframe, so I can sign an employment contract with unpaid non-compete clauses and just ignore that part as it’s illegal.
Oh, won’t someone think of the poor mass copyright infringers.