On the other hand, the open weights models could crawl and annotate and rl the training data that Anthropic and OAI did in exactly the same way, and take the exact same legal hits. They use distillation because it's cheaper not to do so.
What is the other hand here? They could do slow/costly illegal think #1 instead of the fast/cheaper illegal thing #2 that they currently do?
However, if there is no systematic difference between regular use and “distillation use” then they need to establish intent, which is laughably hard if you cannot even distinguish use cases.
Hence the call to make it illegal too (and just against ToS). Because if it is illegal, then they can rely on US to enforce the law. And the US, for a lack of technical solution, can use the good old “China bad” shortcut.