API distillation doesn't have to explain all of K3's capabilities for it to have happened. Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870
This behavior is exactly what you'd expect from a model distilled from Claude.
There's a detailed analysis of K3's ambiguous identity here: https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/...
This analysis observed K3 identifies itself as Claude approximately 15% of the time.
K3 reproduces Claude's correct current model id, which the real Claude models themselves do not emit. This suggests K3 was trained on Claude data labeled with deployment metadata (API logs, tagged synthetic data), rather than Claude's chat outputs.
And there's an entire Reddit thread discussing Kimi's similarities with Claude https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1m2w5ge/did_kim...
This analysis shows K3 and Opus/Fable have unexpected correlated outputs https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full
> Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude
It could also be have been trained from collected response datasets. Claude got caught several time responding it was ChatGPT or even Deepseek and I don't think Anthropic has been distealling DeepSeek.
> This behavior is exactly what you'd expect from a model distilled from Claude.
The opposite actually. If they wanted to distill Claude without getting caught they could just use a regex to change Claude to Kimi in their distillation pipeline!
and claude will call itself chatgpt etc.
nothing new, all ai labs are immoral and not bound by any reasonable oversight or ethical constraints. All outlaws in their own rights on that front. Absolutely none of them have true rights on the matter of being distilled from given historic and continued behaviour. I'm not sure why this is a talking point at all? We know AI companies steal, the least interesting behaviour among this is them stealing from one another.
For me, a far more interesting and important point of conversation on this matter is anthropic buying rare or evwn unique books, processing them for training data, and then destroying the books for others cannot use it as well.
Permanemt destruction of priceless primary source materials is so many leagues beyond copying a copy that I cannot fathom it even registering as a discussion point.
It does not reproducibly identify itself as Claude, there's evidence to the contrary in the very thread you linked: https://x.com/bobbyNewcomb5/status/2078151562828947954
But then again, the identity could also have slipped into the model from other sources during pretraining. The internet is full of "I am Claude": https://grep.app/search?q=i+am+claude and variants https://grep.app/search?q=i%27m+claude
Either way, there's probably no significant portion of Mythos/Fable or Sol in there as OP has stated.
Surprising they didn't clean that from the data before training. It's easy to identify, a simple search->replace gets most of it, and a cheap LLM can identify the edge cases (e.g. avoiding "Claude Shannon" -> "Kimi Shannon" or something).
fwiw, Gemini 3.5 has identified itself to me as an OpenAI product on multiple occasions.
Claude Sonnet 4.8 reproducibly identifies itself as DeepSeek when asked in Chinese:
https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101
I mean, people can point fingers however they want, and the fact is nobody actually "owns" the data they feed to their LLMs...
Kimi calling itself claude means nothing. During pre-training, when the model learns to "simulate" the internet text, it will naturally be fed with a bunch of data about Claude and ChatGPT. With the amount of LLM outputs on the internet today, it is not surprising at all that a model would naturally call itself Claude or ChatGPT. You can mitigate that in post-training (or actually in pre-training as well) by training on many examples of what the model should call itself. That being said, getting probably hundreds pf thousands of ChatGPT and Claude examples totally "pirged" out of the weights is going to be difficult and really more hassle than its worth.