Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google warn rivals are distilling their models. The same companies have spent years scraping the web without permission. The symmetry is hard to ignore.
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Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have spent months warning that rivals are using their AI models' outputs to train competing systems. The practice, called distillation, lets a company extract much of a model's intelligence for a fraction of the development cost. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut. OpenAI and Google have made similar claims.
That argument carries a symmetry the AI industry is struggling to explain. For three years, the same companies have scraped web content without permission, built products from it, and defended the practice as fair use. Website owners say their operating costs have risen because of relentless bot activity from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Anthropic, for example, sends thousands of crawling requests for every single referral it generates for a site, site operators have reported.
Anthropic frames the distillation issue as a cybersecurity problem. The company says swarms of bots attack its models to extract intelligence. OpenAI and Google have used similar language. The security frame is hard to square with the industry's own behavior, researchers say. Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab, told Business Insider that as long as AI model outputs are public,
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