[zozbot234]

The original reporting of this from Anthropic didn't mention "authoritarian-backed AI labs" at all, only frontier ML research while leaving it entirely unspecified and unverifiable what was meant by "frontier". It's obviously reasonable that people would complain about that. And the notion that distillation-at-a-distance could be used to comprehensively "steal" a model, especially a frontier reasoning model that's likely relying on massive amounts of test-time compute, is completely unproven and quite ludicrous if you know anything at all about ML.

[trunnell]

"Anthropic accused Chinese firms of 'industrial-scale distillation attacks' on its AI models."

"Distillation involves training less capable models on more advanced ones’ output, and can be used illicitly to acquire powerful capabilities cheaply. The AI startup accused China’s DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot of generating 'over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts,'"

https://www.semafor.com/article/02/24/2026/anthropic-accuses...

After reading their posts and watching interviews with Dario it's abundantly clear that they view Chinese-lab distillation of US frontier models as a threat to US national security. You can argue with them about whether that is true, but not whether distillation is real.

[zozbot234]

It's definitely real, in the sense that it's a real violation of ToS. It could perhaps be used to guide a few narrow capabilities in very specific domains, given a model that's already most of the way there. But no, it's nowhere near the same as "stealing" a model outright, nor does it replace basic innovation in AI. And it's indistinguishable from practices that have long been common in the industry as a matter of fact, regardless of any ToS requirements.

[trunnell]

Oh, I agree distillation isn't stealing "outright" as in it's not theft of 100% of the model. But there's a reason they're doing it. I didn't say anything about Chinese labs innovating -- obviously they are.

What accounts for the difference between your attitude that distillation is no big deal, "common practice," yet Anthropic sees as it as a huge threat?

[zozbot234]

I never said that "it's no big deal". It's a clear-cut violation of ToS, and Anthropic are within their rights to care about that.