Eric Simons

Anthropic says it has reduced the data harvested from Claude in distillation attacks by around 90–99%. I congratulate them on this achievement. It’s consistent with the point I made a few months ago (All-In Ep. 282): Anthropic, not the government, was in the best position to stop distillation of its own models. Once the horse is out of the barn, there’s limited value in after-the-fact government action. At the time there was a major push in Washington to restrict open models on IP grounds. The threat looked serious enough that 50 companies — including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Palantir, and Dell — published an open letter in defense of open-weight models. Jensen Huang promoted it in his first-ever X post. Nearly 200 startups sent a similar letter. I argued that restricting open models risked removing the incentive for closed-model companies to solve the problem themselves — and could reward negligence by stifling competition while they continued collecting revenue from distillation. The administration did not impose those restrictions. Now we see the result. Anthropic invested in defenses and they worked. Not every technical challenge is a reason to run to Washington for new regulation.