{"id":287392,"date":"2026-07-08T17:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T21:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-by-will-lockett-jul-2026\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T21:40:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T01:40:11","slug":"ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-by-will-lockett-jul-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/08\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-by-will-lockett-jul-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"AI \u201cDistillation Attacks\u201d Are Profoundly Stupid | by Will Lockett | Jul, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wlockett.medium.com\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2\">AI \u201cDistillation Attacks\u201d Are Profoundly Stupid | by Will Lockett | Jul, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wlockett.medium.com\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2\">https:\/\/wlockett.medium.com\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-07-08 17:01:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"wlockett.medium.com\">wlockett.medium.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"gb gc gd ai ge gf gg fo gh speechify-ignore\">Press enter or click to view image in full size<\/span><img alt=\"\" class=\"bd hw hx hy\" width=\"700\" height=\"446\" loading=\"eager\" role=\"presentation\"\/>Photo by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"fd63\" class=\"pw-subtitle-paragraph jc ii ij bb b jd je jf jg jh ji jj jk jl jm jn jo jp jq jr cu dy\">Apparently, the law applies to everyone else but AI companies..<\/h2>\n<p><span class=\"bb b bc u bg\"\/><\/p>\n<p id=\"f320\" class=\"pw-post-body-paragraph od oe ij of b jd og oh oi jg oj ok ol om on oo op oq or os ot ou ov ow ox oy hi bg\">Anthropic recently sent a letter to US officials accusing Alibaba of \u201cbrazenly\u201d and \u201cillicitly\u201d 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 \u201clegitimately\u201d, 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\u2019s more advanced model to train its small, lightweight model, it is considered an illicit distillation attack, as the original developer isn\u2019t 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\u2019s argument is far more stupid than you realise.<\/p>\n<p id=\"e289\" class=\"pw-post-body-paragraph od oe ij of b jd og oh oi jg oj ok ol om on oo op oq or os ot ou ov ow ox oy hi bg\">For those who don\u2019t know why this is hypocritical, let\u2019s start at the beginning. Chatbot LLMs need to be trained on a truly colossal\u2026<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wlockett.medium.com\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI \u201cDistillation Attacks\u201d Are Profoundly Stupid | by Will Lockett | Jul, 2026 https:\/\/wlockett.medium.com\/ai-distillation-attacks-are-profoundly-stupid-ea70556a0ab2 Publish&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287393,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/miro.medium.com\/v2\/da:true\/resize:fit:1200\/0*wp0mR5z4RhFl-OLm","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-287392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-llm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287392"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287394,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287392\/revisions\/287394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}