Anthropic isn't just renting out compute, they're renting out a closed model that's better than anything you can download for free. So they're rightfully focused on preventing others from distilling their model.
It's in Anthropic's best interest to focus the conversation on "distillation".
Imo the more interesting thing to focus on is that there are now several more labs with the expertise and capabilities to train trillion parameter models. That's a serious technical accomplishment and the main reason why open models are catching up to Anthropic and OpenAI (and local models are typically distillations of much larger models).
Who cares that they got some small amount of training data out of Claude. The crux is that the big US labs are not special, they just have a first mover advantage that's slowly shrinking as incremental progress becomes harder.
