Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46
So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models.
This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider.
It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything.
It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using.
If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
They tied themselves into knots fighting the letter of the law, and now, when they need the spirit of the law - that each creator deserves protection for their work - now we devolve to the law of the jungle. Maybe we'll even see LLM book curses, the way medieval scribes damned book thieves to blindness and worms.
I am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can.
Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.
It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...
Pretty sure?
Guy this was openly stated more than a decade and half ago by all the current oligarchs
Companies are well within their rights to choose who they sell to. I don't see how this is 'privately enforced copyright'.
Also, copyright has always been privately enforced anyway?
DMCA? Which is actually an American law enforced globally?
Enforcement ultimately happens through law and the legal system.
> If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does", then surely a model distilling another model is transformative and fair use.
I mean it quite likely is sort of in the same legal bucket. It won’t stop them suing but it is going to be the legal equivalent of two biologically-related warlords making their champions fight with their hands tied for sport.
Are you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?
They already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?
Only any who hypocritically want protection for their own models (are there any?). The morality of scraping everyone is arguable; it's when you object to being scraped back that you reveal yourself as a scoundrel.
Yes. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use.
That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling.
>"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropic is enforcing for all its major competitors."
Cursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access...
And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi...
So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.
Anthropic seems to have no issues: https://x.com/NotTomBrown/status/2093541294027280657?s=20
LOL, obviously Space-cursor-xAI-musk-imperial-holdings-inc is providing them compute. They either _can't_ cut them off, or they know not to bite the hand that feeds them.
Yes Anthropic’s chief compute officer said nice things about one of Anthropic’s chief providers of compute. Recall that compute constraints are one of their existential risks.
Remind me to set up public nitter so I can post a nitter link to whatever this is, and then I can read it.
Not being able to read about Musk doing some shit because Musk have done some shit to Nitter is just peak comedy.
Just go ahead and do set it up. You’ll be my hero (I don’t have mental capacity to research which jurisdiction works for this right now, but obviously not in US or EU.)
Noone is good here. Mr. Altman built a non-profit organization to help humanity, yes, that is what he said at first...
This is a battle for power, let us not be naive...
> if that datacenter deal they signed with Musk changes anything
It's hard to imagine a 1B / month deal wouldn't.
Why you would trust Elon Musk to not hack you and steal your model weights is beyond me, but maybe they intend to use that compute just for training, still I’m sure there’s plenty of research there to take too…
i'll be surprised if anthropic doesnt follow. cursors biggest advantage has been giving users a polished wrapper around whichever frontier model they prefer
>Musk admitted to distilling their models.
what's the moat for AI labs like OpenAI and Antrhopic as they seek trillion IPOs. a lot of people said Chinese models also distill US LLM models. if it is this easy to do. how do US AI labs justify asking for trillion?
Well, they will stop releasing their latest models, and just attempt to eat all software themselves.
Otherwise, it will be competitors distilling, and the government getting upset.
It's hard for me to see a different future.
And, this really sucks.
If this thesis is true, I wonder what the final YC batch number might be.
I believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?
Even if they have Astra or whatever completely to themselves, how do they deal with the -product- side? Or sales, or account management?
They've been focused on juicing model's coding capabilities, but it's absolutely -not- "gen ai" enough to be doing the whole thing in agents, even 3 or 5 years from now, if only because there's so much context we _can't_ give to these models, without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
They don’t need to make you or me, people who actually make software, believe that every anthropic employee is actually and in fact, right now, a „10x software factory controlling thousands of agents“, they need to make investors and CEOs believe, and then hope that making that true is possible and that they can keep the fiction up long enough and get enough money and infra built out to make it actually true.
Just guessing - companies which not outsource development to likes of infosys will outsource to OpenAI instead.
Markets and rationality are sometimes just acquaintances
Oracle makes billions selling SQL when you can just use a free version. This is no different. Enterprise has enterprise needs. It's really not that complicated or irrational.
Anthropic wants you to think that models that distill from them would be worthless otherwise. It’s not true, it’s just one part of the process. The whole narrative that Chinese and other models are only good because they distill is nonsense.
Distilling merely saves an expensive part of the process: hundreds of millions. So even if distilling wasn't a thing, what justifies trillions ?
running on someone else's server, you're basically giving them your weights.
Anthropic runs a significant portion of their compute on xAI hardware - why are you even talking about trying to suggest their relationship is acrimonious?
Some of you guys hate Musk so much that you say blatantly nonsensical stuff. Like, how can you be on HN and authoritatively mouthing off and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract, or the fact that xAI took down its own Grok compute capability so it could sell that compute to Anthropic? And if Anthropic hated Musk/xAI as much as you are saying they do, why would they be paying xAI billions for compute? Think/research before typing.
> how can you be on HN and not have some idea about the xAI-Anthropic compute contract
Some of us are still employed mate