They stole everything and now they want to close the gates behind them.

"I got the loot, Steve!"

I feel like the distillation stuff will end up in court if they try to sue an American company about it. We'll see what a judge says.

It's not really paranoia if it's happening a lot. They wrote a blog post calling several major Chinese AI companies out for distillation.[0] Perhaps it is ironic, but it's within their rights to protect their business, like how they prohibit using Claude Code to make your own Claude Code.[1]

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578701

I would say not all that ironic. Book publishers, Reddit, Stackoverflow, etc., tried their best to attract customers while not letting others steal their work. Now Anthropic is doing the same.

Unfortunately (for the publishers, at least) it didn't work to stop Anthropic and Anthropic's attempts to prevent others will not work either; there has been much distillation already.

The problem of letting humans read your work but not bots is just impossible to solve perfectly. The more you restrict bots, the more you end up restricting humans, and those humans will go use a competitor when they become pissed off.

It is absolutely not paranoia. People are distilling Claude code all the time.

That isn't irony, it's hypocrisy.