alt Hacker NewsDeepSeek, minimax and so on have razer thin margins but unlike openai and Anthropic they are actually making some profit. Doing this doesn't make any financial sense.
Maybe Anthropic is confusing Chinese AI providers with token resellers using the same alibaba infrastructure? Or maybe something like openrouter was switching between operators depending on price/demand/availability?
Also, how can Anthropic have such accurate information about state actors and cybercriminals? This is the same company that hacked itself and realised that first months later..
Replies
My understanding of what Anthropic are saying about this is that the labs in question aren't forwarding things to Claude to make money nor even to look better to the customers whose queries they forward to Claude but to get access to conversations between real users and Claude, which they can then use to help train their own models.
(I do not guarantee that I'm understanding right, and still less do I guarantee that what Anthropic say is actually true.)
Anthropic is profitable now
>https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/08/17/anthropic...
You do this to distill a model.
You can submit your users' questions async too, but if you do it sync, then you can also RLHF on the users' behavior after the output.
I’ve seen the supposed Kimi thinking output yap about Anthropic’s guidelines and whatnot on many occasions - could also be the result of distillation, but also that straight up being Claude’s output.
To be honest I've also gotten Kimi to do an okay proof of concept for SQLi though mostly in a more defensive role, like "Let's see how big of a problem this is", while Claude complained about CVP on the same task.