What Anthropic's complaint establishes institutionally is a claim that model distillation — querying a deployed system at scale to replicate its capabilities — constitutes IP theft. That claim is legally serious. It is also the same claim that authors, artists, and publishers have been making about frontier model training for three years, in courtrooms Anthropic has been defending. The labs cannot simultaneously argue that scraping creative work for training is transformative fair use and that scraping their deployed models for distillation is industrial-scale fraud. The legal positions are in direct…