Ben Thompson writing at Stratechery and making a larger point about Chinese models copying other frontier model labs:
To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here?
Emphasis mine.
Update 26 July 2026: Seems the going rate for copyright infringement by AI is about $3,000 a pop. I’m sure that’ll be sufficient in these distillation cases, as well.