[smeeth]

Uh, what?

> Distillation is not illegal by every definition of the word

Note that Anthropic (and USG) alleges [0] not only that Kimi was distilled, but that they actively circumvented measures intended to stop distillation. There are multiple ways that's illegal, including:

- Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.

- Economic espionage: 18 U.S.C. §1831 criminalizes obtaining a trade secret through theft, fraud, or deception while intending that it will benefit a foreign entity.

- Trade-secret misappropriation: if Anthropic could argue industrial-scale querying reconstructed proprietary aspects of Fable (like by showing it produces similar outputs, as others have done) then it's illegal under 18 U.S.C. §1832.

- California computer-access statute §502 bars knowingly accessing a computer system and, without permission, taking, copying, or using its data.

- Computer Fraud and Abuse Act protects against the case where restrictions against an activity are circumvented (like Kimi is alleged to have done).

> There are millions of samples available on huggingface and models explicitely trained on output produced by fable. There has been no action taken against them.

A lack of prosecution does not make something legal. There is also the scale/commercialization thing, which isn't an issue with random tiny HF datasets/models. Remember: Kimi also sells K3 inference.

> kimi architecture is vastly different than that of fable

How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.

> US AI labs are inspired by opensource advancements just as much as open source labs are inspired by traces from models such as fable.

Cool. The difference is that one of those things is legal (because they chose to open-source) and one of those things is illegal theft of trade secrets (because it was stolen).

> Claiming in any shape or form that fable disillation is one of the primary reasons why kimi k3 is so competitive is slandering the work of other labs that cooperatively push the open-source models forward.

1) this has nothing to do with other labs, just Moonshot (and Z.ai, MiniMax, DS)

2) slandering or not it happens to be completely true, so, there's that

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

[zaptheimpaler]

All of the models stole the entirety of written knowledge on the internet to train. They are being sued for the few cases where we have some proof of what they did because of some whistleblowers, all the rest will just go unpunished. They breached Github TOS, robot.txt's, copyright, patents every form of IP protection under the sun from a billion sources. It's just ridiculous for the thieves to cry about someone else stealing from them.

[smeeth]

Do you care about the law or not? I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

[Dylan16807]

For me, when it specifically comes to copying, I don't think it's bad to copy a copier. (And by that I mean Anthropic has no valid complaints against Moonshot. Any valid complaints from anyone in the original corpus are valid against both of them now.)

In this way, it is different from literal theft. Stealing money/objects from a thief and keeping them is not justified.

[smeeth]

It's a little different in this case, since 1) not all the data Ant used was stolen and 2) they did contribute significantly to the value of the stolen good.

An analogy might be a baker stole 20% of the flour used to bake their special bread, which was then stolen. Both thefts are obviously wrong and bad.

[optionalsquid]

The exact same argument could be made in Moonshot's favor.

Being a bit tongue in cheek, one could also argue that by releasing their models, Moonshot is contributing much more value than Anthrophic. Did Prometheus not create an immense amount of value, when he took fire from the hands of the Gods and gave it to humans?

[Dylan16807]

I think any analogy with physical theft is too different from data to apply to this comparatively subtle case. Especially when we get into the details of just using the output of the model to train on.

[asadotzler]

The baker stole 100% of the flour to make the bread. He also stole the water and the salt and the yeast and the heat for his oven. What he didn't steal was the time he put into crafting a recipe for bread and the time he sat around waiting for the oven to bake it. Now, is that loaf stolen property? Hard to say. But the baker is undoubtedly a thief. He should be tried and forced to pay restitution out of his ill-gotten profits for sure. If we can't do that, the next step is pitchforks and guillotines.

[chasil]

I don't really have an oar in this water, but...

"Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot"

https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-approves-15b-...

[mcphage]

> I think theft is bad everywhere, not just when Anthropic does it.

It seems like you think theft is bad everywhere except when Anthropic does it.

[archagon]

Not OP, but copyright law is an absolute joke. No, I don’t care one whit that someone’s TOS was violated. In fact, I find it hilarious. And it’s not “theft.”

[smeeth]

"I think we shouldn't have IP protection at all" is a totally valid position to hold, but that's not the law is. OP said it didn't violate the law, and it does.

[archagon]

Some laws are very obviously unworthy of consideration, with broad consensus from the public. See what happened when Napster came out. Literally no one cares about some red-faced RIAA suit flicking spittle over some shared Metallica albums.

Same thing here. This whole situation is just comical.

[runako]

It's a rational position to care about the law, but insist on a queue when related parties are involved.

In this case: resolve the theft claims against the US frontier labs, and only then let them make claims against third parties. It would be totally unreasonable for (say) OpenAI to extract a settlement from Moonshot and use that to pay its own claims. Ordering matters.

[jbxntuehineoh]

no, I don't care about thieves getting stolen from. why would I?

[zaptheimpaler]

If the law was applied uniformly, I would support its continued uniform application. In the last 10 years, I don't see it being applied fairly at all, I see an oligarchy, a criminal and corrupt government and rich and powerful entities getting away with anything. The most minimally competent legal system would ask the AI companies, show us the list of all the data you've used to train and lets hash out the copyright - instead we have to pray someone leaks one tiny piece of what they trained on and then sue for that. Open-weights models are the closest thing we have to justice in the world where the legal system no longer provides justice, because at least the model trained on all of our data is given back to all of us.

[vharuck]

I find that I care more when copyright violations cause actual harm to the copyright owner. Let's say there's an American kid who can't speak Japanese but wants to keep up with a weekly manga. He downloads a bootleg translation and shares it among his friend group. That is a copyright violation, but meh. If he hadn't gone the illegal route, he'd more likely just not read it at all. There's very little chance he'd pay for a subscription and learn Japanese.

Now, if that kid were to print the bootleg translation and sell it to schoolmates, that's worth a slap on the wrist. The kids willing to pay would likely have paid for official copies.

When these LLM labs download our works, feed them into their models, and sell the output to people that used to pay for our work, that's worth a very hard slap. I honestly have less of a problem with the open models.

[SubiculumCode]

They breached some TOS, but your first sentence is pure, over the top flim flam

[himata4113]

I do agree that two wrongs don't make a right, the terms of service generally gives cooperation the power to sever the contract, but it does not make things illegal in the literal sense. The illegality usually comes from widescale fraud which includes accessing services you are banned from accessing.

When I said "Does this matter?" I specially meant that distillation in itself, the data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.

And what I explicitely pointed out that focusing so much on distillation is an attack on open research and claiming that the majority of advancements are thanks to US labs which is simply not true (at least not anymore this was somewhat true during deepseek R1 era), but that in itself was inspired by open research.

> How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.

Because anthropic would be the first ones to make that information public and the architecture is unique to kimi... They made it, they wrote papers on it, it's their research.

P.S. none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen, the one about circumventing distillation protection might hold up in court although unlikely.

[smeeth]

> The illegality usually comes from widescale fraud which includes accessing services you are banned from accessing.

Agree, and this is exactly what Anthropic is alleging.

> data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.

It's important to note this is NOT what happened. Anthropic was able to trace data directly back to employees at the company: "We attributed the campaign through request metadata, which matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff."

> none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen

There is a lot of work showing Kimi models produce similar outputs to Anthropic models, which constitutes trade information. This is not dissimilar to past and ongoing IP suits against Anthropic and OpenAI by showing the models would recreate images of Mickey Mouse/NYT articles etc.

For the record, I'm a researcher myself and I'm well aware how competent the researchers are at the open-source labs/how much they've contributed. But that's not at issue here, my disagreement with you is specific to your arguments about legality; you're conflating what you think should be legal with what actually is legal.

[himata4113]

This is mostly just to reiterate myself as the original question was "Does this matter?"

Everything else is simply justifying why it shouldn't, the specifics don't really matter as there is no legal framework to stop china from continuing to distill models and anthropic has proven they cannot use software solutions to stop it either as distillation is still a problem. But I do still believe it wouldn't hold up in court either way as stopping companies from generating training data which was trained on the entire human knowledge corpus is just stealing from thieves and making it 'open' once again so the argument only gets weaker.

edit: to add, the mickey mouse / nyc was because anthropic trained on LICENSED works, not apple to oranges. The original work it was reciting was licensed and not licensed BY anthropic.

[asadotzler]

What precedents can you cite and specific examples of their applicability. That is, what would Anthropic's lawyers take to court? You can't say because there's nothing there that couldn't be ripped apart by the least legally capable community known to man, HN. That's why no lab has succeeded in a suit anything like what you're claiming could happen. The only reason Anthropic or any other lab would pursue this is political or commercial. They're either looking for help from officials or they're trying to establish a particular market position.

[AlanYx]

>Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.

This is true, but Kimi also has a variety of defenses. Kimi can't raise unclean hands if Anthropic systematically violated others' terms of use, but it can raise copyright misuse (which is similar in some respects to unclean hands) as well as lack of standing to enforce restrictions in the contract due to the third party beneficiary principle (i.e., Kimi would argue that Anthropic cannot sue Kimi for derived IP that rightfully belongs to third parties whose terms of use were violated by Anthropic, and the proper party to sue Kimi, if any, would be those third parties). That latter argument usually fails in small-scale cases (ProCD) but has been successful in larger ones where the alternative would be anticompetitive.

[FpUser]

>"A lack of prosecution does not make something legal"

Plainly who gives a flying fuck. The US can claim whatever rules they want and so can China or any other country. On international level all those rules are artificial constructs unless they can be enforced. China can just say for example that they do not recognize copyrights /patents / whatever so it is "legal" for them.

[smeeth]

This is illegal in China too, there's just an enforcement asymmetry. I understand what you're saying is de facto true, I'm just taking issue with people saying either

1) its not illegal (it is)

2) it shouldn't be illegal because Anthropic stole training data (thats not how the law works)

[FpUser]

>"1) its not illegal (it is)"

I am a practical man. From what I see laws are mostly for common folks and often do not even serve real justice. The higher one goes and the amount of money / power involved the more the laws bend and on international level the only law that matters is the size of one's club and willingness to use it. And when the country with supposedly biggest one starts crying I find it laughable.

[skippyfish]

> Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.

Ah yes, I remember when Anthropic crawlers abided by the TOS of the websites they slurped up.

All your other points are downstream from this, which makes them pretty tenuous. Labs don't think that ToS or other explicit wishes of content providers apply to them, but they expect everyone else to abide by theirs.

[smeeth]

To be clear, I think theft is also bad when Anthropic does it.

US and CA law really don't care that Anthropic violated IP law elsewhere.

[FireBeyond]

Well, if you're solving the -root- problem, then Moonshot would have had nothing to "steal" if Anthropic didn't "steal" it first.

[well_ackshually]

I hope Anthropic pays you a lot to defend them this hard <3