I don't think that there are laws against LLM distillation in the United States. It's only a terms of service violation. For all of the complaints about model distillation that OpenAI and Anthropic make, you don't see them saying that it's against the law:

https://openai.com/index/disrupting-a-coordinated-model-dist...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

They would probably like it to be against the law ("Distillation attacks at this scale require a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers") but I hope that legislators decline to grant their wish.

I don't see why that should necessarily be true.

If you read the article, scraping is “not clearly legal”. Read those 3 words carefully.

Distillation is legal. ToS violations are not crimes. There's nothing illegal about capturing output to train with it.

There will probably be (hypocritical) AI companies trying to claim some kind of minimal "protections" are applied to the output in order to misuse DMCA violation claims, but it's BS.