Microsoft's Satya Nadella takes a veiled swipe at Anthropic and other AI model makers - Business Insider

Satya Nadella, the man who turned Microsoft into an AI leasing agent, has decided to do a bit of moral philosophy on X — because where else do you solve an industry-wide credibility gap? He called out model makers who whine about distillation for being hypocrites: they happily invoke 'fair use' to hoover up the entire public internet for training, but cry foul when someone uses the same trick on their outputs.

Nadella's target is clearly Anthropic, which has been moaning loudest about distillation — and which also happens to be the subject of a rumoured acquisition by Amazon. The irony is that these model makers built their empires on the backs of copyrighted data scraped without permission, only to discover that their own models are now the tastiest training data around. It's like a fisherman complaining that other boats are catching his fish, while still using a net that catches everyone else's. The entire AI industry is now a circular firing squad built on borrowed arguments and stolen bases.

What makes this particularly rich is that Nadella's techno-optimist framing — 'this is just fair use!' — conveniently forgets that Microsoft's own terms of service for its AI products are some of the most restrictive in the industry. His X post is a masterclass in selective indignation: one rule for the little guys trying to replicate your model, another rule for the giant corporation that wants to replicate everyone else's. But hey, at least the free market of ideas is working — we've gone from 'move fast and break things' to 'break the rules and then define them'. What could possibly go wrong?