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Comment by villish | Hacker News Reader

The workarounds used to bypass Anthropic's security measures are quite illegal. They use stolen credit cards, API keys, and accounts. That is only possible in China because any other US/EU lab doing the same would get into massive legal trouble.

That's the moat. Mistral has the capability but not the legal protections.

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I'm confused why Chinese access to Anthropic A.I. would need to involve stolen accounts.

Couldn't I simply give a Chinese friend my key on Open router?

Yes but Claude is filtered by the Great Firewall. Anthropic also restricts Chinese access. Their security measures aren't bulletproof but they do catch a substantial amount of those accounts and ban them. That's why PRC labs that distill from Claude need thousands.

Hah. Anthropic and OpenAI used plenty of similarly illegal workarounds to obtain data to create their first models. If a Chinese company had done that first you'd be here saying

> That is only possible in China because any other US/EU lab doing the same would get into massive legal trouble.

Let’s not kid ourselves, Anthropic would be running their own distillation “attacks” too if _they_ were the ones playing catch-up. They’ve already shown as much with their illegal scraping of pirated books ($1.5B settlement).

I say just let them duke it out. After a decade of regulatory capture and enshittification, it’s nice to see some actual competition again.

> Anthropic would be running their own distillation “attacks” too if _they_ were the ones playing catch-up

Probably. But if OpenAI or Anthropic stole your credit card to purchase tokens you could sue them. You won't get a cent from any Chinese labs.

> it’s nice to see some actual competition again.

Competition benefits everyone. But this isn't fair competition. A German startup cannot legally do any of these tactics required to bypass Anthropic/OAI's counter-measures. Which makes EU less competitive and therefore less investment in European AI.

> A German startup cannot legally do any of these tactics required to bypass Anthropic/OAI's counter-measures.

A German startup cannot legally do what Anthropic/OpenAI have done. And neither could Anthropic/OAI themselves. What's your point again?

> What's your point again

I said it in my original comment. That is the moat. The reason frontier AI is a two horse race. European labs cannot gain ground because the only way to do it is illegally.

Your original comment painted it as a China moat against US/EU labs. Completely different from instead being a unique disadvantage to EU labs by which the US labs, among others, aren't really affected.

The European labs are distinctly disadvantaged. US labs scraped the entire internet and downloaded copyrighted works to train their models and just paid a fine. They get 99% of all investment money in AI because of the lead they hold. Chinese labs also scrape the internet, download copyrighted works, and launch massive distillation campaigns using stolen accounts and credit cards. They get full support and funding from the PRC.

Europe gets barely any funding because it is so far behind and cannot use the illegal strategies Chinese labs use to distill Opus/Astra. Mistral cannot compete because the competition is literally breaking every law.

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