alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
"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.