The thief cries "catch the thief!"
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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New Qwen release incoming!
Q: if you steal a stolen thng, is it stealing?
Maybe they can protect themselves with a.. great firewall of USA?
The article is not clear on what a "distillation attack" is... what exactly is Alibaba supposed to be getting away with here? The article mentions using many different connections through obfuscation networks and proxies... so that would get them around rate limiting, and maybe enable them to submit many queries on free accounts... just spin up a new account whenever you hit the token limit of an unpaid account. So basically it's a terms of service violation?
I don't see why it's necessarily a huge leg up for a competitor... they are just using the outputs of another model as training data. They still need to train their model, which is the expensive and energy intensive part.
It sounds to me like Anthropic just wants the US Government to help enforce its TOS internationally and force Alibaba to pay for those precious tokens? Because apart from that piece, the "attack" just seems like normal use of the service. If Anthropic's service has an inherent vulnerability, that's their problem.
Of course all the other comments about how they stole all their training data in the first place are spot on.
Distillation allows you to make a smaller model that can produce the same outputs as a larger model. Basically they're pirating all of the hard work anthropic did pirating the entire internet.
Alibaba gets a model that produces basically the same output for a tiny fraction of the cost to operate the model once it's finished training. Distillation training also uses basically all of its data from the big model (afaik it's all of it sourced from the parent model)
It's like if you took a lump of metal and showed it Porsche 911s until it turned into a 911 shaped chunk of metal that had 95% of the performance, but it only cost you $3000 for the ingot, and also cost ⅕ the amount in fuel and maintenance.
Claude's still there, seems Alibaba's attack wasn't really all it's cracked up to be.
Now the US gov's attack seems to be working since Claude Fable 5 is still not there.
What's the science behind cloning?
LLMs are trained by taking a passage of text and masking out the next words. The LLM has to guess what the next word is going to be.
If you use the output of a fancy ass billion dollar model as your training data, you can duplicate the output style and "knowledge" of the parent model if you show it enough responses. That's basically what Alibaba did. They prompted the shit out of Claude and used the responses to train their own model which allows you to piggyback off of Claude's hard work pirating the entire internet. Your cloned model can also be smaller and leaner, being cheaper to operate.
I said this elsewhere but it's like taking a block of metal and showing it Porsche 911s until it turned into a Porsche 911 with 95% of the performance, and it also costs ⅕ the cost to maintain and fuel it.
you can't just call anything you don't like "an attack"
I declare an attack!
You cannot just declare it. That doesn't do anything...
How about "terrorism" or "national security threat"?
Exactly!
Still, stop attacking me.
Stop attacking me!
oh no, the data I stole is being stolen, whatever shall I do.
In other news, does anyone know a good source for crocodile tears? I ran out.
Sounds like Google complaining about scraping.
Nooooo, you can't train on OUR data! That's illegal!!!1
Lol corporate thieves bitching about other corporate thieves is the funniest part of 2026
Okay, so Anthropic distills MY copywriter data and it’s fine.
Alibaba distills Anthropic non-copywritable and that demands retaliation at the nation state level.
Fuck off. The rules are abundantly clear.
Anthropic just knows it has political leverage, that's it. Large parts of US infrastructure and business now rely on Claude models to even function the way they do with the staff they do, and you can leverage that dependence into political action and retaliation pretty easily in the name of "national security".
Enclosure or inclosure[a] is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of "waste"[b] or "common land"[c], enclosing it, and by doing so depriving commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage.
They stole to monetize without paying in money or attribution what we stole to monetize without paying money or attribution!
Well, they did pay, just after the fact.
That's settlement, not a payment for the stolen goods. If I steal your shit, and to avoid going to jail I offer you some money, I am not paying for what I stole, I'm paying to avoid further consequences.
Well they didn't pay me. But still used all my open source mit and agpl, gpl icensed code to train their model. And now I need to rent their compute back.
You chose to publish under that essentially says "do whatever, I dont care". I can understand people who wrote GPL code being peeved, but writing stuff under MIT is pretty much designed to let companies take it and not give back.
Sorry also some projects are agpl or gpl indeed. I actually meant to say agpl. They most likely also stole that. Let's be honest here.
For example my WineGUI project is agpl. Also I'm also fine if they trained on it. But then they should open source their models and data and their other projects.
I mean sure, Anthropic are pricks, but "they did exactly what the license I put on my code said they could" is probably not the way to highlight that.
My bad. I actually meant agpl. And gpl. You're right to point out the that mit is fine. Which is true. Mit can be used for whatever.
But my for example my WineGUI project is agpl. Pretty sure those Ai companies used all open source code regardless of the license.
Is there a scenario in which they both lose? I'll take that.
Alibabas Qwen were among the first open weights models that were actually useful and can be run on consumer hardware without too much difficulties.
If they continue with that, they will hurt the business model of the big AI companies significantly, accelerating the burst of the bubble.
I heard there was some new AI model that was so amazing for cyber security that they had to limit access to it. It's just too bad Anthropic couldn't use that.
Ai cloned the world. Please give me a break.
AI going after their few paying costumers