Claude Opus 4.8 distilled Alibaba Qwen models

Tried it. It says Opus 4.8.

The replies to that Twitter thread are getting the same result.

Until there's some replication, I assume this person is either trolling, or they're paying for a scam proxy service claiming to sell Opus 4.8 API access but routing the requests to Qwen.

He used some proxy service, because both China and Anthropic ban each other. It seems the proxy service disguises Qwen as Opus, as Qwen is much cheaper.

Just a reminder that it's bad when China does it. But the other way around, well that's just business baby

How the turntables. In February Anthropic published a blog post [1] accusing DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of distilling their models, with a scary foreword about national security and then revealing the extracted data was about general reasoning, agentic coding and tool use.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...