The answer to widespread theft is not to simply allow the guy who did the theft to get away with it because his implementation was cheaper.

It's to punish theft.

But distillation is not theft. They are paying for the usage of the API. It is also not copyright infringement, as AI companies do not hold the copyright for the output of their models.

> But distillation is not theft.

Legally no, but I think an honest reading of the 'fair use' statute doesn't actually pass the 'doesn't compete with the author's original work' aspect of fair use, even if the use is transformative.

Fair use? Anthropic does not own the copyright to the output of their LLMs. Fair use does not enter into it at all.

not when by your own rules it's legally ruled "not theft".

Rules are flexible. The people who pay attention know this.

People expect the US to apply rules evenly to both American AI efforts and that of its primary geopolitical rival. China certainly doesn't do that. Their entire economy is based around giving Chinese firms the advantage regardless of what it means for the wallets of consumers at home or abroad.

Since that's who we're playing against, and no one is going to willingly give up their open-weight models from the totalitarian rival, well, then use their ruleset.

It's that or punish the theft by making the US companies pay for their training data and blocking outside efforts that trained off the data the US companies stole.

Exactly! While the people who spent more money on their theft are rewarded with more business to counteract their losses! Justice is finally being wrought on those who have wronged society with their wicked ways!

(/s if it wasn't obvious)

Being serious, it is far more likely, especially given the events of the past 18 momths, that Trump is just doing autocrat things because he can, and ultimately doesn't really care what is and is not good for American business as long as he continues to grow his wealth through corrupt behavior.

> Trump is just doing autocrat things

Yeah, he really is. It's awful. We're creating a class of elites that are accountable to no one, and their hold on power is slowly becoming sanctioned by law. It wouldn't surprise me if we soon had a system where there were people in various professions who considered themselves professional Trumpists who got to steer the fields they were in according to the diktats of the party. You would have to be in-line with their ideology to get anywhere in a career, whether it be in industry, politics, arts, or science. It'd suck.

You know where you see a fully-developed version of this idea?

China.