For years, tech giants have argued that if information is available on the internet, it can be used for AI model development and outputs. They call it fair use. Content owners have tried to prevent this, with no success.
Now Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don’t like and can’t stop.
The latest flashpoint is something called “distillation,” using the outputs of one AI model to improve another. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut for rivals. OpenAI and Google have made similar warnings recently.
At least the models like Qwen have open weight versions. It’s the same concept as distributing compiled binaries, though, whereas we really need true FOSS models where all of the code and training data are available under a permissive license. All of these models were trained on copyleft-licensed content, so all of it should be FOSS if the licenses were actually being respected. From that perspective, distillation attacks shouldn’t even be necessary and I couldn’t give two shits that there is no honor among thieves when the real thievery is that these models are closed source.