AI “Distillation Attacks” Are Profoundly Stupid | by Will Lockett | Jul, 2026
AI “Distillation Attacks” Are Profoundly Stupid | by Will Lockett | Jul, 2026
https://wlockett.medium.com/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2
Publish Date: 2026-07-08 17:01:00
Source Domain: wlockett.medium.com
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Apparently, the law applies to everyone else but AI companies..
Anthropic recently sent a letter to US officials accusing Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” attempting to extract its AI capabilities with the largest known distillation attacks on them to date. Anthropic flagged 16 million interactions with its Claude chatbot across 24,000 fake accounts as distillation attacks tied to Alibaba and the Chinese AI models it works with. If you have never heard of distillation, it is a relatively common AI training method where the output of a larger, more advanced model is used to train a much smaller, lighter model. When conducted “legitimately”, this is a great way of making smaller, cheaper-to-run models that are still relatively capable. But when an AI company uses the output of a rival’s more advanced model to train its small, lightweight model, it is considered an illicit distillation attack, as the original developer isn’t being paid for their work. If you have even a passing understanding of how LLM chatbot AIs work, you may already see the cosmic-sized hypocrisy at play here. But I guarantee you that Anthropic’s argument is far more stupid than you realise.
For those who don’t know why this is hypocritical, let’s start at the beginning. Chatbot LLMs need to be trained on a truly colossal…
