[zozbot234]

Yes, this is pretty clear-cut. There's even a great alternative, namely GLM-5, that does not have such a clause (and other alternatives besides) so it feels a bit problematic that they would use Kimi 2.5 and then disregard that advertisement clause.

[NitpickLawyer]

I've replied down the thread, but there are ways to go around that clause entirely, even if it would be enforceable. The obvious way is to have another company do the modification.

[zozbot234]

The worthwhile question AIUI is whether AI weights are even protected by human copyright. Note that firms whose "core" value is their proprietary AI weights don't even need this (at least AIUI) since they always can fall back on "they are clearly protected against misappropriation, like a trade secret". It becomes more interesting wrt. openly available AI models.

[Majromax]

> The worthwhile question AIUI is whether AI weights are even protected by human copyright.

I'm also deeply curious about this legal question.

As I see it, model weights are the result of a mechanistic and lossy translation between training data and the final output weights. There is some human creativity involved, but that creativity is found exclusively in the model's code and training data, which are independently covered by copyright. Training is like a very expensive compilation process, and we have long-established that compiled artifacts are not distinct acts of creation.

In the case of a proprietary model like Kimi, copyright might survive based on 'special sauce' training like reinforcement learning – although that competes against the argument that pretraining on copyrighted data is 'fair use' transformation. However, I can't see a good argument that a model trained on a fully public domain dataset (with a genuinely open-source architecture) could support a copyright claim.