Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Distillation Attack on Claude

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Today on the podcast, Meta is changing its mind on reassigning thousands of its employees to AI training, and we also have Anthropic, which is accusing Alibaba of a $28 million query distillation attack on Claude, basically where you ask Claude, you know, 28 million questions, you get them back, you take the questions and answers, and it's called distillation, but you use them to train your model. General Intuition has just raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation to train AI agents on gameplay, and Claude's paying customers are up 75% since January. This is pretty big because they're starting to eat severely into ChadGBT's lead. We also have Accenture, who is rationing AI tokens because their employees are burning them on basic tasks that are not super important. And Naveen Rao's unconventional AI claims a 1000x cut in inference power, which again, I'm super excited anytime we can cut the water and the power used for AI because that is basically how we make this scalable, and we unlock a lot of really cool potential. If you've ever been sick of having to pay for multiple subscriptions to multiple AI models, and you want to talk to all of the top AI models in one chat, this is something that always annoyed me when I was stuck with just Claude or just ChadGBT or just Gemini, you know, I wish I could get the responses from others in there, especially when you have something like Claude, which doesn't generate images, or you have something like Grok, which might not be as good at generating audio as 11 Labs. I've built the AI Box Playground, my very own startup, where you can talk to all of the top 80 models in one place. So you can ask Grok that question that Gemini refuses to answer, and then you can get 11 Labs to create an audio file for you. You can get ChadGBT to do deep research and Claude to help you with reasoning. You can do it all in the same chat. So if you want to go check it out, there's 80 plus AI models, there's image, audio, video, even music models that we have in there. And you can talk with all of them in the same conversation, start multiple conversations, and you can compare the results side by side. Something I love is asking one model to generate an image and then asking ChadGBT to generate the image, and you can see the image results side by side. Pick what model is better for which task you're working on. If you want to try it out, it's aibox.ai/playground. It's only $8.99 a month, and I will leave a link in the description to go check it out. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Meta. They have reversed the decision that they made last month to read a poll away thousands of their engineers, and they're going to do this to a whole bunch of different AI training roles. They had this internal memo that leaked. It was seen by Business Insider, and it went very viral. But basically, it's said that they are going to quote, defer to each individual's choice when they're talking about if they want people to go and work on the AI effort. So before they were like, okay, look, we're making a whole bunch of our employees are going to be forced to kind of go and work on this AI training. They were reshuffling how they were organizing their whole company. And I think they got a lot of backlash from inside of the company. Apparently, their CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said in a recent interview, he said that it was, quote, probably one of the worst it's ever been when he was talking about the morale over at Meta, just because I think they've done a bunch of layoffs. They're making a bunch of shifts. And so anyways, they had this big backlash that how much people inside the company that were like, signing up petitions against this big move. And so now they're going to let people decide if they want to work on the AI effort or not. My only thing that I will say here because this was about 7000 employees that were kind of recruited in May, that were going to be doing like data labeling and a bunch of other mandatory AI stuff.
You know, they have the option to do it or not, but I'm sure there's some percentage, if they say no, they just will be let go or something. So I'm curious to see how much of an impact this is. However, I think just giving people the choice is definitely something that will have a good, like it's good overall for the morale, but I don't know if it's like a really like, oh man, look, Med is just letting them do whatever they want. So I think there's a little bit of that. Okay, Anthropic is accusing Alibaba of doing 28.8 million questions in a distillation attack on Claude between April and June. They said they had about 25,000 fraudulent accounts. This is the largest known distillation attack on the company to date. They said, and they kind of disclose this in a letter to the Senate Banking Committee, that there is a major loophole. They said that foreign labs can bypass US chip export controls by simply scraping model outputs to train their own AI. Okay, there is so much to unpack here. The first thing is, they're like, they're bypassing US chip export controls. Okay, forget US chip export controls. What they're really saying here is, anybody can do this, like Alibaba, whatever, anyone, and could go train a model, could go make that model open source. But like, what is Anthropic's moat if Alibaba can go and run 28 million queries and distill their model?