>This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint.

No, it's perfectly reasonable once you get down to reality.

China is not going to care about IP. That's just a fact. So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny.

We don't have the privilege to be able to hold western companies to higher ethical, legal, and environmental standards and not risk competitiveness.

That there is a whole lot of people right now who insist on doing above and still somehow praise China at every turn is something historians or news outlets will have to make sense of in some 5 years time.

Give up IP for end users and people will be pretty okay with giving up on IP for ai companies. You can't have different standards for special companies though.

> So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny.

Anthropic is currently angling for a "IP restrictions for China but not for me" la-la land scenario. If they were instead arguing for either of the choices you said, it wouldn't be hypocritical.

why should western AI companies be held to different standards than Chinese ones? Neither of them are your buddy.

They shouldn't be. But the point is, they are. OpenAI and Anthropic are paying many rights holders for access to their data (reddit, NYT, etc.).

So distillation, among other things, allows Chinese labs to indirectly benefit from these arrangements at no cost to them.

Oh really - how much are individual Redditors getting paid?

Their claim is even stronger than that, they have complaints about their models being used as a validation step for other model output, which is standard practice in the industry.

How does anyone justify this? How can you argue this in good faith?

Snarky answer: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Realer answer: A combination of the above, plus group/bubble effect of all your coworkers saying the same thing. You as a group, conflate a bunch of concerns together (China, no-guardrails-AI, etc), decide that your group will be the responsible stewards of AI, and then anybody "stealing your work" appears dangerous - both to your livelihood and to the human race.

Google is apparently taking a different stance and offering distillation as a paid product

https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...

But nobody wants to distill Google's models, Gemini is really bad.

strong agreement, I've stopped using all closed weight models on principle, but the latest gemini models have increased hallucinations and now talk back, so double reason not to use them

I think GLM 5.2 is in part distilled from it.

You don't get to take distilled model home, it all stays with Google.

It's "optimize your costs in our garden" product.

yup, strings are certainly attached when dealing with US Big Tech / Ai

I recommend Fireworks as an alternative