Of course - buying a competitors product and tearing it down to analyze it is business as usual.

The stupidest part of this is that Anthropic don't even provide the real reasoning traces in their model output. It would be like Ford buying a Chinese EV to tear down, then realizing that the seller had removed the battery and charging system before shipping it to them.

Does anyone believe for a second that Anthropic isn't sending requests to all the Chinese models and analyzing the crap out of them to assess how capable they are, what their reasoning looks like etc?! I guess they'd call that "using" the model, since that sounds nicer.

Sandy Monroe has a business product he sells to Big Auto where he tears down cars, creates a bill of material in incredible detail, and expert notes about the process of how the car is made.

If that's not distillation in the auto industry, I don't know what would be. They all seem fine with, and benefit from, this as an industry.