Google Says People Are Copying Its AI Without Its Permission, Much Like It Scraped Everybody’s Data Without Asking to Create Its AI in the First Place

Google has relied on a tremendous amount of material without permission to train its Gemini AI models. The company, alongside many of its competitors in the AI space, has been indiscriminately scraping the internet for content, without compensating rightsholders, racking up many copyright infringement lawsuits along the way.

But when it comes to its own tech being copied, Google has no problem pointing fingers. This week, the company accused “commercially motivated” actors of trying to clone its Gemini AI.

In a Thursday report, Google complained it had become under “distillation attacks,” with agents querying Gemini up to 100,000 times to “extract” the underlying model — the convoluted AI industry equivalent of copying somebody’s homework, basically.

Google called the attacks a “method of intellectual property theft that violates Google’s terms of service” — which,…