Last year, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion in settlement over pirated books, and now it’s busy teaching the entire AI industry what “stealing knowledge” means. I just saw Anthropic announce further progress in its anti-distillation technology, claiming it has significantly reduced the effectiveness of distillation attacks against Claude over the past few months. Previously, it publicly named Chinese AI companies—including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, and Zhipu—accusing them of training their own models by大规模 calling Claude. Now, Anthropic not only aims to identify and block suspicious traffic but is also restricting the extraction of reasoning processes at the model level. It even secretly degraded response quality for certain requests to deter distillation—only adjusting after public criticism. When training large models, internet articles, books, and code were all used as training material. AI companies argued that machines learning from human knowledge was both technically and legally justified. Yet today, when other models learn from Anthropic’s own responses, it suddenly becomes a critical security threat that must be fiercely guarded against. Anthropic is fully entitled to protect its business interests. What I find objectionable is its tendency to frame commercial competition as an AI safety issue, attempting to legitimize rules dictated by industry leaders. Moreover, I believe Anthropic’s highly visible anti-distillation efforts reveal a troubling truth: the commercial moats of top model companies may be far more fragile than they’re willing to admit. If leading intelligence can be replicated at low cost, then the massive training investments and pricing power of closed-source models will be hard to sustain indefinitely. An industry that grew by absorbing all of human knowledge is now seeing its most powerful companies attempt to prevent knowledge from continuing to spread. This is something I believe everyone should be deeply wary of.