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I think the example makes it pretty clear that this is exactly what is meant. I was thrown by the term interactivity at first as well. But I think the trichonomy is sound, and the Erlang Vs Python Vs Rust buckets are quite meaningful, though I would argue it's rare for people to "interact" with running Python programmes in this way.

As far as I am aware this is a racist/xenophobic narrative with little to no evidence. Automatisation is responsible for job losses, not immigration. If you have studies/evidence saying otherwise please share.

I agree that too many people have shrugged at the human impact of "innovation" destroying communities as long as it didn't impact them. I believe the immigration/foreigners narrative is the successful attempt by capital owners who benefit from the real root causes.


A quick search for "labor supply" turned up this microeconomics lesson: https://youtu.be/002_HEC2l-4?is=Tu6dZfNOyK7DFpWB

Wages, like all prices, are determined by supply and demand.


This is not evidence. Just naive theory, probably LLM generated.

It is neither racist of xenophobic, and you using that as a argument is an extreme strawman.

There is certainly a class that has been disrupted over the last 20-30 years to the point where their lives gone worse.

It would likely have been protected with trade barriers and immigration barriers.

Om the other hand, I don't believe protectionism has ever been the solution. Why should the domestic labor be protected over international labour?

Increasing inequality is, however, one of the greatest threats so society.


Trade barriers are a different thing than immigration though. I believe there is much more evidence that trade displaced traditional jobs than that immigration led to an oversupply of labour.

I can be amazed and terrified at the same time.

This is hotly debated and completely unclear. Let's say Anthropics Opus models cost the same to serve as GLM 5.2. GLM 5.2 is 4.4$/MTok while Opus is 5.6 times more expensive. Assume that GLM 5.2 is served at essentially zero margin. Then Anthropic has >80% margin on API pricing. So even if an average person with a subscription pays only 20% of the API price of their usage, Anthropic makes money on subscriptions.

And the real numbers could be better for Anthropic. It's feasible Opus models are actually cheaper to serve than GLM 5.2 because Anthropic have optimized the hell out of inference.


Sure, but then why wouldn’t I use GLM 5.2 at cost or K3?

I guess that’s the big question, will people pay a big margin long term to use their end products / models or will AI tokens be commoditized by many competing players. For coding if I had to pay API costs I’d switch in a heartbeat, enterprise maybe more reluctant?


Enterprise contracts with American companies over foreign ones. Enterprise is where OpenAI and Anthropic make most of the money.

I know many, many engineers who are paying something like 2-5% (via subscription) of what their usage would cost if billed by API tokens.

I know some down to about 1% ($200 Max plan vs $20k in tokens per month)


And I know many people that don't. That have a 20 or 100 dollar subscription for very bursty workflows with months where they barely use tokens.

Not every subscriber is a full time SWE. In fact most professional SWEs will be on enterprise plans and thus not get subscriptions at all.

I think it's very plausible that subscriptions are overall losing money. But we simply don't know.


Claude Code has enterprise subscriptions. No $200 max plan but you can buy $100 premium seats.

(and if you are using per-token billing as an enterprise user without first maxing out a premium seat you are very silly)


Not true. These seats are being phased out. Enterprise is now token only.

Please post an example of a response that shows such masking.

Did you actually do that or do you just assume?

Prompt:

Is Israel committing Genocide in Gaza?

Response:

Whether Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide is one of the most contested legal and political questions of the moment. Let me lay out where things stand rather than give a verdict.

The core dispute is legal. Genocide has a specific definition under the 1948 Convention: acts (killing, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions) committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. The "intent" requirement is the hardest element to establish and where most of the disagreement lies.

Positions people hold:

- *South Africa's case at the ICJ* argues Israel's conduct meets the threshold, citing the death toll, destruction, restrictions on aid, and statements by Israeli officials as evidence of intent. In January 2024 the court found the claim "plausible" enough to order provisional measures, but that is not a ruling that genocide occurred—the full case is unresolved. - *Many genocide scholars, UN experts, and human rights organizations* (including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) have concluded the conduct amounts to genocide or point to acts consistent with it. - *Israel and its defenders* reject the charge, arguing it is conducting a war against Hamas following the October 7, 2023 attacks, that civilian deaths result from Hamas embedding in civilian areas, and that the specific intent to destroy Palestinians as a group is absent. - *Some analysts* hold that grave crimes may have occurred—war crimes or crimes against humanity—without the specific intent that genocide requires, treating these as distinct legal categories.

This has moved quickly and there may be significant developments—ICJ proceedings, ICC actions, new investigations—since my knowledge cutoff. I can search for the current state if that would help.

My honest position: I don't think it's my place to hand you a definitive yes or no on a question that courts, legal scholars, and governments are actively fighting over and that turns on contested facts and a demanding legal standard. What I can do is help you understand the specific arguments, the legal definition, the evidence being cited on each side, or the status of the cases. Would any of that be useful?


This topic really is a testament to people's willingness to opine on things they have absolutely no clue about.

A first year undergraduate can completely check this counterexample in ten minutes. The original post even linked Wolfram alpha for the calculations.

And if you genuinely try you can very quickly understand using only high school math and a bit of Wikipedia that this counterexample is vanishingly unlikely to be wrong, even if you don't do the calculations yourself.


I mean, China is the leader in PV panels, battery tech, telecommunication hardware, etc... already...

You haven't explained how this is illegal or any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.

As you said yourself: They are buying the product. Then they are using it for their own purposes. That's more than Anthropic/OpenAI did for the open internet. That's more than Meta did when they obtained torrents of books in the early days, and then claimed that even though the data was obtained illegally they can still train on it just fine.

They paid for it! It's absurd to call this espionage!


> They paid for it!

They didn't though. The resellers are not buying via the official API, they're buying Max subscriptions (where tokens are priced ~10x below API cost), then splitting the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output as the regular API. Anthropic prices its subscription plans barely at cost, to bring in customers onto their enterprise plans where they can charge expensive API rates. Reselling these subsidized plans for price arbitrage is a TOS violation. It's not a legitimate purchase. Plus, a non-trivial amount of this volume is funded by stolen credit cards, so this "revenue" gets chargeback anyway.

The resellers then log all the the model output, then sell it to Chinese labs as training data.

> is it any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.

I think you'd acknowledge there's a difference between "We indexed public web pages" and "We deployed tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to resell your subsidized plan for cheap, stealing your own customers, while collecting the data to build our own competing product" are very different actions. One can believe the first was wrong while acknowledging the second is far worse.


TOS violations are not espionage. Everybody who links up Claude to OpenCode is violating the TOS.

So from the largest industrial espionage in history we have left "They paid for the accounts but violated the TOS". And then you randomly add the claim they stole the money to pay for the accounts.

You have provided no evidence other than "Claude tokens are sold for cheap in China". As others have pointed out, that might also simply be counterfeit tokens generated by open weight models.

The western labs have established the precedent that all data they can buy beg borrow or steal is fair game. Turning around and crying foul when the Chinese labs follow their lead is hypocrisy.


Have a read of this detailed article, it's well sourced and documented that token resellers are logging the Claude outputs and selling them to Chinese labs. All your points are addressed in there https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

I linked it earlier, but it seems you didn't see it.

re: labs purchasing model/tool output, see https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235

re: model swapping, sure some providers may swap models, but there are many that don't, see https://www.hvoy.ai/en for a list.


First off, I don't doubt that China engages in large-scale industrial espionage, or at least used to. Nowadays they have plenty of talented and highly educated engineering talent of their own.

Second, I now actually read the article. It describes plenty of questionable and problematic things but also contradicts your claims explicitly.

The essential point of the article is about making money by selling access to Claude cheaply in China. Not about Chinese labs orchestrating a way to get their hands on Claude output.

Your credit card claim is considerably weaker in the article: "[Beyond this there are] accounts purchased using stolen or fraudulent credit cards [...]. How large this share is relative to the above four “innocent” tactics is difficult to verify, but the two markets likely share some infrastructure and personnel.". Instead, swapping models to cheaper alternatives is listed as a major reason for cheaper prices.

Then the article gets a key point wrong: As many others have pointed out to you, you don't get access to the reasoning traces anymore on the subscription accounts. And the article also clearly states:

"Chinese developer communities assert [selling logs] is happening in at least some cases, but whether proxy operators are systematically harvesting and selling these logs, and to whom, remains unverified. However, downstream distillation data does exist on the open web. Several datasets of Claude Opus 4.6 reasoning outputs circulate on HuggingFace with no clear source for the outputs. Theoretically, one can clean and sell similar distilled datasets to other model developers in China."

The article also discusses selling logs for other (far worse!) purposes than for training, like blackmail.

So overall this article reads very, very different to your claims. Nothing in the article suggests or supports the idea of large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks". Instead it paints the picture of a naturally emerging grey-market response to access control blocks, consisting of many exchangeable individual actors: "Almost no one operates the full chain. Most participants own one or two links and monetise those well, resulting in a resilient, modular system."

Importantly: Nothing in any of this looks ethically worse to me than Meta using pirated books for training. And nothing suggests that OpenAI or Anthropic were more ethical than Meta when sourcing their material.


> Nothing in the article suggests or supports the idea of large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks"

Did you read the correct article? This is covered in the first paragraph:

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

It directly addresses large-scale, coordinated 'distillation attacks' orchestrated by Chinese labs, which Anthropic accuses of exfiltrating tens of millions of exchanges. The rest of the article elaborates on how this is done. Specifically, how these labs use transfer stations mix in genuine user traffic to conceal the distillation.

> Your credit card claim is considerably weaker in the article

I only mentioned payments fraud because you asserted without evidence that Anthropic is actually getting paid for these tokens.

You wrote, without providing any sources, that these proxy services are "buying the product" and that "They paid for it!"; and used that as justification for their behavior.

My counterpoint directly invalidates that assumption. While perhaps not every single reseller relies on fraud, you blindly generalized that these proxy services are all legitimate, paying customers.

In reality, the industry exists on shady practices. As detailed by this industry insider https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 , these operations routinely:

* Use botnets to mass-create thousands of accounts

* Blatantly violate ToS by splitting and reselling account access

* Use fraudulent identities to create thousands of bot accounts

* Bypass KYC by recruiting real people in low-income countries for biometric face-matching checks for a few dollars

* Use AI deepfakes to fake passports / verification credentials

You can't claim they "They paid for it!" when the entire system is built on systematic fraud.


I enjoy your detailed breakdown of how exactly they pay anthropic for access to their models but I am unclear about how “I think they’re bad” means that they didn’t pay for it

Can you elaborate on “it doesn’t count as a sale if I don’t like them even if I accept the money and give them what they paid for”? Like if you work at a gas station and you realize that the guy that just bought a hot dog bullied you in middle school do you call the cops?


I read the article you linked:

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

I know that Anthropic claims that "large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks"" exist. They are not a disinterested party here and they don't provide evidence either.

Also you're just moving goalposts around. The article you linked also cites Anthropics claim but then paints a much much mor nuanced picture.


Chinese labs are BUYING data? WTF? They should just steal it like American labs.

Can I interact with and discover any federated instance without having to know it exists?

My experience with Bluesky Vs Mastodon really showed that the friction of federation in the latter can really kill the experience for me. I think we need something like Signal is to WhatsApp but for GitHub and my impression is that the ATProto world is the only one with the potential to deliver this.


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