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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

In fact you could reasonably argue that life for most people didn't change that much from establishing agricultural settlements all the way up to industrialization. Most people spent most of their time procuring food and clothing/shelter using roughly similar methods.