alt Hacker News> Distillation attacks, in which attackers use thousands of fake accounts to extract a model’s capabilities at industrial scale, create safety and national security risks. Distillation allows bad actors to create highly capable models without the safeguards we build into Claude. Our September 2026 threat intelligence report details the illicit distillation activity we’ve detected and disrupted so far.
Such a negative tone they put on this. Distillation is amazing, because it means anthropic and openai fail to keep a monopoly. Who even are they who claim it's unethical? If it is truly unethical, then so is the mass data scraping they do on my personal website on a regular basis (without my consent), and all the unauthorized use of content produced by authors, blog writers, wikipedia contributors, and creators everywhere. If it is truly unethical, then anthropic, openai, meta, google... all these companies should have deleted their LLMs long ago. This wording disgusts me.
Heck, it would be amazing if we had more models without guardrails - some of the models that are produced via heretic[1] are actually quite nice to use - in particular, I've enjoyed investigating Chinese censorship by interacting with an abliterated model of Qwen3.8-27b. If security is really a concern, then secure your systems - don't attempt to dumb-down the tools we use. If someone breaks your window, then they are responsible, not the hammer they use to do so.
I'm confused how they have been able to create so much public negative perception around distillation. It seems pretty clear that they are the only ones who lose out, and everyone else benefits. I don't have any ethical issues with it, nor is it illegal: at worst it's a ToS violation.
IMO the biggest problem with distillation is that not enough people are openly doing it. I would love to see more small, competitive US labs instead of having the eggs in 2~4 baskets (depending on how you count).