Remember how Kim Dotcom got destroyed for criminal copyright infringement? One would think the big tech CEOs would face the same fate, that police officers would rappel down helicopters, storm their mansions and bring them out in cuffs.

Instead the AI companies reached these absurd settlements with publishers that made a mockery out of all the previous copyright enforcement victims.

Whatever happened to honor among theives? What is this world coming to..

The corollary is that there are no morals once the stakes are in the $ billions, let alone hundreds of billions.

This isn't even about a single person or personality. Very few people in such position could stand fast by their moral code. In any case, an environment that favors profit above everything will naturally select for individuals who are unencumbered by such hindrances.

There might've been 100s of Altmans and Amodeis who had a strong moral code but we don't know about them because they dropped out of the "race" because of said moral hurdles.

I never get tired of posting this answer because everyone on the internet is adopting this hot take:

If you look at it with your eyes crossed, Anthropic and the chinese are doing the same thing.

If you look at it with nuance 1 the chinese are doing way worse stuff, and 2 stealing from a thief would still be stealing

1. The chinese are making multiple accounts (at least 49,000)[1][2], using proxies/VPNs, possibly using residential computers and infected computers (unless you think the chinese are doing due diligence to ensure their purchased IPs are kosher). All accounts need to be created with a real name, and especially so if the paid models need to be accessed and paid with a credit card. So this is beyond IP theft and getting closer to fraud. These are all techniques that are well studied because they are used by criminals and cybercriminals, textbook stuff. Consider if that was not sufficient, that China is banned from using the product, so they need to use identities and locations not just to avoid relating the accounts between themselves, but merely to allow account creation. What identities are they using to create accounts.

Compare this to Anthropic which reads notes made a deal in an IP theft case paying billions because they bought books and scanned them but buying the books wasn't sufficient retribution for the authors. Or that they gasp scanned the internet, like Google.

Not having nuance to see the difference between the two companies is something I expect of the twitter echo chamber copying hot takes for upvotes, not hacker news.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

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