If you can play it right, you don't even need to send suspicious prompts to the frontier models. Just use them for regular tasks, extract the encrypted COT blocks and replay it to a cheaper model to get the plain text COT.
But the real question is: Is it okay to steal from a thief's hoard?
By definition it cannot be stealing since you're paying for the tokens. It may be against their ToS, depending on what you end up doing with those tokens, but it cannot be stealing. If they charge by the token, all your tokens are belong to you :)
I also find it very strange that everyone sort of accepts their ToS like no big deal. Imagine MS using the same terms for their software - you cannot use any MS software to develop competing services. Bananas! They'd be dragged through the courts like it's the 90s.
(I get why they're doing it. Distillation is unreasonably effective. But still, I find it bananas that we've kinda accepted it, to the point where people use "stealing" or "attack" or any such terms)
(though maybe there's another interpretation of the thought alignment?)
Buy the Neiman Marcus cookies and feel entitled to the recipe?
Lots of secret sauce in the world.
Sure you can set spending limits, just like you can make an account and give it a limited amount of credits.
I’m not sure this argument is correct. You can sign whatever contract you like with the model provider, right? Including “you are entitled to the end product but not the intermediate scratch work”?
Coming from a place of genuine curiosity: is there some precedent or statute that would invalidate that contract? I don’t see why the reasoning tokens belong to you.
For example, I pay lawyers by the hour but don’t necessarily own their meeting minutes, recorded discussions, research notes, etc.
Are you a lawyer?
My understanding of US law is that there’s nothing in logic or precedent that makes such a contract unenforceable.
As for whether it’s “stealing”: they might be able to press charges under federal Trade Secret Theft laws, I’m not sure. But I’m not seeing how you can be so very very certain that it’s at best a civil violation of contract. What’s the reason for your confidence that a judge would never find this to be trade secret theft or economic espionage?
How does this relate to your previous paragraphs? LLM outputs are not copyrightable and you didn't break into Anthropic servers to steal the files from there. So how exactly is it theft? If I send an "encrypted" files to thousands of peoples and some manage to figure out how to read it I can't really accuse them of that or can I?
Besides that, the capabilities of a model are heavily dependent on the unsupervised learning phase, that gobbles all kind of other people's IP without giving a fuck. All the underpaid work behind the masses of third world programmers creating those post-training datasets would be completely uselless without it.
Also, it is kind of funny that labs resort to the "Research, time, money and expertise" argumet, when it is basically the same argument from publishers and other IP creator that the labs spent millions of dollars of lawyering money to resist. Besides, US law rejects in: Effort and cost by themselves not necessarely generate protectable interests.
About encryption, I think we're all contaminated by the bad ideology behind DMCA. While encryption established the intent, it doesn't follow that they have a legal claim of exclusivity just because of it.
Technically, you're overstating the value of so called "reasoning traces". You can't infer the verifier design, the reward shaping,or the data pipeline from them. Also, what you can extract are not the traces themselves, but the written summary of it, and you can't even guarantee that this summary reflects the exactly reasoning trace, models have show to have lied about it. Besides, distillation works when the student model already has strong priors, you can't turn a weak model in a SOTA with it. Don't believe Amodei's outrageous lies about it, he is just trying to exercise some regulatory capture.