alt Hacker NewsShrug.
Hard to feel sorry for companies that created their empires by ignoring copyright themselves.
Also, 'most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever' is absolute nonsense. They did not need to infiltrate the companies for this nor are you accusing them of stealing any trade secrets. This is only about whether they looked at their competitors' products from the outside (in the form of conversation tokens) and used it to improve their own product (by training). Hardly the crime of the century.
> 'most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever' is absolute nonsense
You are completely underestimating the scale of what is happening here.
Chinese AI labs are actively facilitating an industrial-scale network of tens of thousands of bot accounts, that resell Claude tokens at 97% below official API prices. They buy subsidized Max 5x plans (sometimes with stolen credit cards), then split the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output. They are running a massive data-harvesting operation. Chinese labs and token resellers subsidize the cost of the tokens in exchange for the API metadata (detailed reasoning traces, model outputs, and tool calls) to use as high-quality training data for their own models.
They are buying Anthropic's own product, just to resell it below cost, just so they can capture the training data. Reportedly, they are paying as much as ~$0.01 per tool call.
https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698
I explained what is happening in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814