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himata4113yesterday at 6:41 PM1 replyview on HN

I do agree that two wrongs don't make a right, the terms of service generally gives cooperation the power to sever the contract, but it does not make things illegal in the literal sense. The illegality usually comes from widescale fraud which includes accessing services you are banned from accessing.

When I said "Does this matter?" I specially meant that distillation in itself, the data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.

And what I explicitely pointed out that focusing so much on distillation is an attack on open research and claiming that the majority of advancements are thanks to US labs which is simply not true (at least not anymore this was somewhat true during deepseek R1 era), but that in itself was inspired by open research.

> How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.

Because anthropic would be the first ones to make that information public and the architecture is unique to kimi... They made it, they wrote papers on it, it's their research.

P.S. none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen, the one about circumventing distillation protection might hold up in court although unlikely.


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smeethyesterday at 7:02 PM

> The illegality usually comes from widescale fraud which includes accessing services you are banned from accessing.

Agree, and this is exactly what Anthropic is alleging.

> data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.

It's important to note this is NOT what happened. Anthropic was able to trace data directly back to employees at the company: "We attributed the campaign through request metadata, which matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff."

> none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen

There is a lot of work showing Kimi models produce similar outputs to Anthropic models, which constitutes trade information. This is not dissimilar to past and ongoing IP suits against Anthropic and OpenAI by showing the models would recreate images of Mickey Mouse/NYT articles etc.

For the record, I'm a researcher myself and I'm well aware how competent the researchers are at the open-source labs/how much they've contributed. But that's not at issue here, my disagreement with you is specific to your arguments about legality; you're conflating what you think should be legal with what actually is legal.

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