alt Hacker News> '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
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Does anything about that strike you as particularly unfair, given the moral compass defined by Big AI?
if Ford bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Hyundais, put extra instrumentation in them, and resold them at a discount to customers who agreed to the instrumentation in exchange for the discount, is Ford doing industrial espionage?
You haven't explained how this is illegal or any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.
As you said yourself: They are buying the product. Then they are using it for their own purposes. That's more than Anthropic/OpenAI did for the open internet. That's more than Meta did when they obtained torrents of books in the early days, and then claimed that even though the data was obtained illegally they can still train on it just fine.
They paid for it! It's absurd to call this espionage!