Anthropic just accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting Claude's capabilities. The internet's response was immediate. "You trained on the open internet and then call it 'distillation attacks' when others learn from you." That's a real quote. from a real AI founder. posted publicly. Here's what's documented: Authors sued Anthropic for downloading over 7 million books from pirate sites to train Claude. Library Genesis. Pirate Library Mirror. shadow libraries. not licensed copies. pirated ones. The judge ruled that using legally acquired books for AI training was fair use. But downloading pirated copies was not. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in September 2025. the largest copyright settlement in US history. paying authors $3,000 per book for roughly 500,000 works. Then, Reddit sued Anthropic in June 2025 for scraping over 100,000 posts and comments without permission to fine-tune Claude. Reddit's lawsuit described Anthropic as having "a public face that attempts to ingratiate itself into the consumer's consciousness with claims of righteousness" and "a private face that ignores any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets." Now Anthropic is asking Congress to protect its IP from Chinese labs doing the same thing it did to authors and Reddit. Nobody is clean here. Distillation attacks are real. The Alibaba campaign was real. 28.8 million exchanges is industrial-scale theft. But the company leading the charge on IP protection just paid $1.5 billion for its own. How the tables turn.