If your moat is “please don’t copy my outputs”, you don’t have a moat. There is no such thing as a distillation “attack”.

US AI companies trained their own models on vast amounts of copyrighted and publicly available content without obtaining permission. There's no moral high ground here.

You know what, if someone wants to downvote this guy by claiming distillation attacks are not "attacks" or don't cross some ethical bound (especially since I just posted a similar comment), then go right ahead, but if you're combining it with any notion of "leadership", that's like saying that the person in 2nd place in a bike race who is drafting behind the person actually in 1st place is exhibiting "leadership".

There's no "leader" if, absent someone whose results you're copying, you are an emperor without clothes

Besides "attack" being a ludicrous name for distillation, note how your article says "accuses", also it's mostly about Alibaba, not DeepSeek (although it's mentioned there). Both Dario Amodei and Sam Altman publicly claimed that DS used their outputs to train their models, and knowing the differences between all these models by heart, I believe they're simply lying through their teeth to sway the public opinion and/or the policy. These models are absolutely nothing alike, and distillation necessarily makes student's outputs similar to teacher's. This is very visible in Z.ai models (which were trained on Gemini outputs to the point that they repeated Google's conditional prompt injections in the CoT, and later on Claude where it started repeating their CoT as well) and certain Google models which were trained on Claude's outputs in a roundabout way. Distillation always shows up in the result.

And certainly they have no idea whether these outputs (assuming they ever existed and it wasn't made up) were used for training. The article mentions that DS made 150k requests. This isn't much and might have been just an eval or a benchmark to compare their own model against. It's really hard to believe DeepSeek had any Claude outputs anywhere in their training schedule, since it's just too different. Besides training on random vibecode of course, which is mostly written by Claude.

While I don't agree with your comment being downvoted, I don't think distillation is either an "attack" nor is it "stealing". The idea that someone else gets to decide how I use tokens that I pay for is ludicrous.

Imagine if your casio calculator would come with a ToS that says you can't use it to develop a competitor calculator or any other tools. Or that your hammer can't be used to make other tools. Or, closer to the HN crowd, imagine MS in the 90s saying that you can't use their OS to build competing services to MS. They'd be laughed at and be split immediately if they tried that.

The only thing they can do is to refuse serving tokens (and even that's debatable, if we get to tokens being commoditised). But that's gonna be a game of whack-a-mole, and they know it.