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by jatins 18 hours ago
> On the other hand,

What is the other hand here? They could do slow/costly illegal think #1 instead of the fast/cheaper illegal thing #2 that they currently do?

2 comments

Neither one is illegal though. Scraping the internet is as legal as surfing the internet. And what Anthropic calls "distillation attacks" is really just paying for and using the service Anthropic provides. I would think a judge would have the same view of distillation as they do of scraping, if Anthropic doesn't want a subscriber to have access to the model, they are within their rights to block access, but it's not the user's job to refrain from using the service. If their usage is so different from everyone else's, they should be easy to detect and block. If their usage is so similar to everyone else's that it's difficult to detect, then it shouldn't be of any concern.
Genuine question: is distillation illegal, or just against Anthropic's terms of use?