Anthropic’s DeepSeek problem: Frontier AI players can’t expect to keep intellectual property protected
Anthropic’s latest complaint against three Chinese labs is a warning sign for Silicon Valley: Don’t expect to earn too much from the competitive edge your model gives you. Companies from the developing world will line up to swim across your moat, if they can—and neither the US government nor your lawyers will be able to help you. As the music industry and Big Pharma could tell them, nobody will eliminate your rivals, you have to accommodate them.The company says it has pretty solid evidence that DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot ran “industrial-scale campaigns” to “illicitly extract” the capabilities of its own model, Claude.
That involved over 24,000 accounts that Anthropic described as fraudulent and 16 million exchanges that were “in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions.”There’s just one problem: Laws that are unenforceable might get ignored. And if they are both unenforceable and profitable to break, then they will almost certainly be brushed aside. It might sound like this is straightforward theft or even industrial espionage.
Anthropic owns Claude and these three labs in China are stealing it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t hold up to closer examination. First, ‘distillation’—what DeepSeek et al are accused of—is, as the American company itself admits, a “widely used and legitimate training method.”Where it gets murky is when your competitor decides to use that legitimate tactic to try and narrow the gap between the two of you.
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