If the distillation "attacks" created useful inputs to open weight models, ai-2027 was directionally correct that the Chinese would find ways to extract IP from western firms. (Scaled account creation and grinding outputs etc is not a dramatic story element as spies, though!)
Whether the distillation has constituted "attacks" or has or will meet the bar of "stealing" IP is not super interesting to me, though.
It's actually turbo boring and predictable. Capitalism has long since standardized on out and out lies to influence public perception and government action.
The idea that distillation is a significant contributor to the capabilities of the Chinese models is not true. Kimi K3 came out 2 weeks after Fable and uses a number of novel NN architecture innovations.
That may be true, though Anthropic reported 3.4 million exchanges with Moonshot months before Fable.
Why bother creating hundreds of (presumably paid) accounts and the tooling to create and consume the data if not of tangible value to their core mission?
Because the founding pillars for most of these labs are basically "more data can't hurt" and "no one died from too much data" and "you can never have enough data".
Whether the distillation has constituted "attacks" or has or will meet the bar of "stealing" IP is not super interesting to me, though.