Suppose you hired a consulting firm to write a report, and they delivered the report but not the internal conversations they had when developing it. You exploit a vulnerability in their phone system to get those conversations. You can argue over semantics of whether “theft” is what you did, maybe the right word is “espionage” or “spying”, but that either way we probably agree you are guilty of something? Paying for the final product didn’t entitle you to see how it was made, unless that was part of the agreement.
Anyway, you can distinguish this from the debate over copyright.
I think a more fair comparison would be that you hired a consulting firm to create a report and give you a summary of it, but you’re charged for the report itself separately from the summary, and you are not allowed to access the unsummarized report.
How is that a more fair comparison? The consulting firm in this case never promised you the interim reports, only the summaries of the reports. They also promised you the final output that the reports led to. You decided that report summaries + final output was worth paying for. You got exactly what you were promised.
I'm not saying they're not useful, of course they are. I am disputing that they are part of the agreed bargain between you and the proprietary LLM providers.
They explicitly do not promise reasoning traces. You (general you) agree to those terms and pay for that bargain anyways.
I’m just driving by here but they bill by tokens — it’s a stretch to turn around and deny your right to see them. And it’s especially egregious when the tokens admittedly, routinely do the opposite of what you instructed.
But personally it’s not about right and won’t it’s just blatant bullshit.
And lawyers bill by 6-minute increments, yet that doesn't mean you get access to all of a law firm's internal discussions and notes about you and your case.
Just because you paid for the lawyer time/LLM tokens doesn't mean you get access to everything that happened within that time/tokens.
But they did deliver the internal notes, just told you to not look at them. Also the analogy doesn’t make a lot of sense to me since humans (or companies paying them) own the content they produce. Based on current precedent Anthropic doesn’t have any more rights to the LLM outputs produced by your inputs than you.
Whether that violates the ToS is another matter Anthropic is of course free to sue for damages or stop doing business with you.
You paid the consulting firm for the outcome. If they sent you a bill for every piece of research they wrote down to get to the report, you bet I would want to see exactly what's inside and what I paid for.
Except in this case the report is giving you conclusions while withholding the data and reasoning process that lead to those conclusions.
Alternatively, I paid for the tokens therefore I should have access to them. If the vendor wants to artificially hide them from me, I'll just find another way to access them.
Anyway, you can distinguish this from the debate over copyright.