Sounds great to me; live by the sword, die by the sword.
But barring the terms of service from forbidding distillation seems like a tough sell. OpenAI shouldn't be allowed to decide what types of customers it wants and doesn't want?
The terms of service don't even necessarily matter here. OpenAI could cancel your account for almost any reason, or for no reason at all. They don't particularly need to cite a ToS violation just as a store owner doesn't need to point to a written policy to kick you out of their store.
If the underlying issue is that LLMs should be regulated as a public good, then lets have that discussion. If it's that the major AI companies are becoming too powerful and anti-competitive, let's talk serious anti-trust enforcement. Micro-managing business policies isn't going to work very well.
You are pointing out that OpenAI can cancel user's accounts for almost any reason, and nobody can really force them to serve customers that they suspect are distilling their models.
That's one thing.
The GP is saying the government can make laws to make terms against distillation unenforceable. Without such laws, if you signed an agreement with OpenAI pinky swearing you won't distill, but turns out you did, you are liable in tort and OpenAI can sue you. (It seems nobody really cares about contract and agreements any more, but still...)
This is the other thing.
And I think you are both right.
OpenAI accused Deepseek of misappropriating trade secrets which could have serious penalties but seems like an awfully hard case to make.
Seems like we’d all be better off with a law that governs data sharing among AI companies, if that’s the policy goal.
Infinite $ since you’re trying to steal their proprietary information, in their view.
Also API usage also has ToS.
"You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!" -- Vizzini
Correct. It shouldn't be allowed to do that.
Wage spiritual warfare against the petit-bourgeoise. They all deserve it anyway, as they are the traditional harbringers of actual fascism.
We are discussing Chinese models. Now look at how much foreign competition the Chinese government prevents in their domestic market in other industries.
It's also a bit of securities defensiveness. Pretending that you really do have a super moat, people just keep swimming in it so you just need to add more alligators.
It's farcical. Anyone who has worked on large models knows that the premise that an almost-Fable model was trained with distillation is beyond ridiculous. It's theoretically possible if they spent tens of billions of dollars on API calls, but it isn't the magic that somehow these people keep convincing people it is.
Previously Anthropic has reported on some Chinese firms doing chicken-shit level of API calls, that at most would be doing some Q and A or final fine tuning. The notion that they're training these models via it is fantastically ignorant nonsense that only very ill-informed and gullible people fall for.
This isn't the big gotcha some people seem to think it is, and the whole news cycle about that was mostly by people who have no idea what they're talking about. It's actually a meaningless data point. But it's precisely the sorts of people who think that a few thousand free accounts surreptitiously snuck off with Fable.
https://m.economictimes.com/industry/renewables/china-wto-co...
"Anthropic said the campaign was conducted between April 22 and June 5, 2026, and generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts."
I don't know why you're trying to downplay it.
European models are so far behind because they don't resort to these tactics on a massive scale. Basically every other country is entirely dependent on 2 countries for frontier AI.
You may or may not be factually correct in your other points, but you're really proving the GP's point here regarding American exceptionalism.
Ignoring that I have literally zero trust in anything Anthropic has to say on this -- they have been doing the hysterical routine and trying to get every bit of government granted monopoly they can[1] -- those numbers still simply aren't that impressive.
>European models are so far behind because...
What a non-sequitur. Europe, like much of the West, foolishly delegated tech, media, payment systems, etc, to the United States. European efforts on this are poorly funded, poorly capitalized, and marginal efforts.
China is very much not Europe. China is looking to leave the US to the dustbin of history, and their efforts are a little more concerted.
[1] Surely Americans are aware that Anthropic and OpenAI are both very close to getting the US government to ban and fully criminalize the open Chinese models, right?
No they didn't. Europe has played a role in building all of these. Especially from the software side.
Also anyone that doesn't like the US is free to stop using any American website, device, or service. There are alternatives to everything. For instance I do not like Meta, I refuse to use any of their websites or devices. The domains are blocked on my LAN.
> Anthropic and OpenAI are both very close to getting the US government to ban and fully criminalize the open Chinese models
This is complete nonsense. First of all most Americans don't give a shit about AI companies like it's a sport and those are our teams we have to support. Second the hysteria around AI is mostly from non-Americans that are completely out of the AI race worried about losing access to good models. That is valid, but also it needs to be recognized.
Yes, they did. Like, look around. Clearly the Western world foolishly and very short-sightedly allowed the US the reigns on far too many things, to its disadvantage.
It is unwinding, but it turns out that having decades of intertwining takes a while to undo.
>Also anyone that doesn't like the US is free to stop using any American website, device, or service.
What an idiotic, useless bit of pablum to throw in there. Back to 4chan with you.
>This is complete nonsense.
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kim...
You want to hate the US but don't want the personal inconvenience of moving away from the daily sites and apps you use. How are these alternatives to american tech going to get enough users if someone like yourself who seems to have a hate boner for the US can't even leave a message board?
> https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kim...
The orange idiot can say whatever he wants. The first amendment makes any ban unconstitutional. US companies being advised about potential backdoors in the models isn't a bad thing, even if I personally think it's FUD, open weights is not open source.
Sorry, OpenAI & Anthropic.
Felony contempt of business model.
> what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models
If it’s as easy as that why do they choose to distill another model and not distill the knowledge on the open Internet from scratch?
A model trained on all knowledge from the internet (and other sources) is large but ultimately not very useful by itself, because it is going to spit out all kinds of garbage. You have to apply multiple further stages of training and refinement to the base model before putting it in front of users. So as an example you can train a model by yourself and then have GPT or Claude continuously check its outputs and correct it when it is wrong, ending up with a far more powerful model.
ToS is just conditions that you agree to in order to use a private service that is provided at-will. I can have a private coffee shop where the terms of service are that you must wear red to enter, and if you're not wearing red, you are not welcome on my property.
So it would be upto OpenAI and Anthropic to enforce them on their own terms (by banning accounts and IPs).
What I'm saying is, doesn't the law already cover 1?
In the US one of the factors is “ the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”.
If anthropic Hoovers up the world’s books and trains on them, and then spits them out verbatim on command, then it will clearly impact the value of the work; nobody will buy the original, they’ll just ask Claude.
Others also argue that even if it’s not reproducing it exactly that the training runs afoul of that factor, specifically the “market for” portion. A rights holder can no longer license their book for training of LLMs if Anthropic goes ahead and just trains on it anyway.
Ah, right. So if we want models to be capable we need them to be trained on as much as possible, yet we also want to stop what you described. So what can be done?
Distillation is just value extract.
It's soft, and I'm not sure what the answer should be ... but I think that there is a difference.
I think we start by recognizing that ... and then try to figure it out from there.
'The Internet' may be a public good, maybe we make them pay a tax for that, but that's different than distillation.
There is a value-add in selecting the valuable parts out of the garbage. And let's face it. Largest models contain a lot of garbage.
We ought to identify that and integrate that into our thinking.
Literally the biggest thing of our generation - AI - is the living embodiment of that 'value add' writ large.
'What is the difference' - is the AI you use all day, in comparison to 'all the world's data' you can use for stuff and do 'whatever' with it, but are not likely to come up with something hugely useful otherwise. Maybe, not likely, if you did, it would be 'value add'.
Copying something is not.
Programming Microsoft Word is value add, copying the code is not.
Copying design ... there are some question marks there.
It's extremely easy to understand at it's core.
What makes it hard, is that faux intellectuals like to deconstruct ideas at the margins, and have those critiques stand in for reason.
"At sunrise the sun is only 'half there' ... there fore there is no 'day and night' just a blur! Day and night are the same thing!"
The training data used is part of all of this is a separate but related question.