Anthropic is tired of getting ripped off

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Back in February, TWiST500 stalwart Anthropic disclosed that it had discovered that several Chinese AI labs were distilling its models to improve their own. While some distillation appears to be the norm between competing AI companies, what Anthropic alleged was far broader and insidious than mere testing.

If Chinese AI labs can absorb the expensive training work that American companies have financed and brought to market, they can offer fast-follow models with benchmark results nearly as good as those of the original models they copied. At a fraction of the cost. Distillation matters.

This week, a letter that Anthropic sent to Congress earlier in June became public. The missive alleges that Alibaba — a company listed on American markets — “executed the largest known distillation attack on Anthropic to date,” including 28.8 million queries from 25,000 “fraudulent accounts” between April and June.

Knowing its audience, Anthropic argues that such distillation attacks will limit the time the United States can remain comfortably ahead of its rival, China. And that such aggressive distillation subverts “the returns on American investments without bearing the costs or risks associated with training frontier AI models.”

Risk and economic loss? That’s the language that Congress speaks, much more than it can parse AI arcana.

Anthropic is not merely talking its book. Reporting indicates that China is working hard to bake AI into its armed forces; distillation attacks are therefore economic sabotage and national security worry all balled up into a single problem. Let’s see what Congress can do in response. — Alex

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