[thewebguyd]

The difference is in licensing. Those platforms are protecting (or rather, monetizing) a database of human authored assets which those humans have given them a license to exploit.

Anthropic (and others) are trying to protect a stream of uncopyrightable, public-domain machine outputs.

[gruez]

I don't see how that's relevant. They have a license to redistribute my comments, but that's the extent of their legal rights with respect to my work. They're not my agent or my publisher. Moreover I don't have any say in the matter. If I'm pro AI scraping, I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls". Finally, what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain? Does that mean they're in the wrong to put up scraping walls?

[thewebguyd]

The license goes beyond redistribution. You are granting a sublicensable and transferable right to your content, giving the platform the legal authority to sell or license it (or to not license it) to AI scrapers and other entities. The platform's right to block said scrapers comes from posession rights.

Its like if you made a painting and put it in a museum. You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc. You licensing it to them makes it their private property to do with what they wish.

> I can't tell them "yeah it's fine to scrape my comment, don't put up any captcha walls".

Correct, because you signed away that control.

> what if I dedicate my comments to the public domain?

That means you forfeit copyright, but you cannot waive the platform's rights regarding their servers.

But, because you still retain copyright (or in the case that its public domain), you can and are welcome to submit it to AI companies yourself. Just because Reddit may not allow a scraper, that doesn't remove my right as the copyright holder to re-submit my comment to another platform that does allow the scraper.

The difference with Anthropic/LLM output is that there are zero intellectual property rights over the outputs once they leave the API endpoint.

[gruez]

>The license goes beyond redistribution. You are granting a sublicensable and transferable right to your content, giving the platform the legal authority to sell or license it (or to not license it) to AI scrapers and other entities. The platform's right to block said scrapers comes from posession rights.

They don't need to sublicense it because the license was already granted by you. Stackoverflow comments are licensed under creative commons, which means you don't need to seek a license from stackoverflow to use it. It's same if you found some random MIT licensed repo on github. It's not github granting you a sublicense, it's coming from the original author.

>You still technically own the copyright, but the museum owns the building. They can lock the door, charge admissino, kick out anyone they want, prevent anyone they want from seeing it, etc.

And Anthropic can't decide who gets to use their service, and for what purpose?

[thewebguyd]

Anthropic can decide who gets to use their service. They have complete control over their services and service.

It still breaks down once the output has left the system though. Anthropic cannot tell you what you can and cannot do with the LLM's output, they do not own that, its public domain. Anthropic can pursue breach of contract, maybe, but they can't do anything regarding your use of the model's output. If China can't access Claude directly, they can just pay some other user in the states to run some prompts and paste the output on a public website, and then use that output and there is nothing Anthropic can do about it.

Fair point on StackOverflow, but they are the exception rather than the norm. Most social media doesn't license the content under creative commons.

[gruez]

>Anthropic cannot tell you what you can and cannot do with the LLM's output, they do not own that, its public domain.

And are they actually doing this? For instance, if you read their press releases about distillation attacks[1], they're not asserting copyright over the outputs, only alleging "fraudulent accounts". So far as I can tell they're not even engaging in legal action.

[1]https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

[thewebguyd]

They aren't taking legal action yet, no, because they have no legal ground to stand on. But they are pushing lawmakers to do something [1]

They are also constantly using the word "illicit" and theft in their communications, and in their lobbying, when there nothing illicit about using model output to train another model. They are trying to create an aura of criminality where none exists.

> But distillation can also be used for illicit purposes: competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.

They do have leverage over fraudulent accounts, yes, but the resulting distillation from those is out of their control under the current legal framework. There's nothing they can do about it, for now.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims...