The only ways to fight this is trying to either: 1. Block it by cutting off access, which is pretty tough because it basically means you cannot offer unmonitored access which is a no-no to a lot of customers, and even then the workload looks very similar to actual real workloads and if the company doing the distilling is a bit sneaky and using intermediaries etc it's almost impossible to stop, or:
2. Try to use IP law to block the practice, which is pretty gross given how they got the data in the first place, and so far no court has supported them on this. And even if they can make it illegal, it won't actually help because there are countries that see having top-tier AI as a national priority and will actually support their companies breaking laws to get there.
People misunderstand why Anthropic is being so stingy about granting access to their top models. It's not some kind of marketing ploy, they know that if they release them fully openly then there will be a Chinese open-weights model in 3 months that is just as good. Also the reason why they try to hide chain-of-thought and the probability distributions.
I don't think the evidence supports this claim. All the important capability gains now come from RL rollouts in real environments. You can't fake that by generating text from a teacher model. Anthropic makes a lot of noise about how China is distilling their models, but all Chinese labs can access is text outputs. They can't even get the logits. Now, compare all of the recent US open-weights models that are far behind the Chinese frontier. Why haven't they simply "distilled" all of those powerful open weight models that are available to them?
Isn't this somewhat akin to a model learning from its own inputs? Doesn't that behavior lead to model collapse? Either the model is trained on pristine data, in which case it stagnates, or it's distilled from another model, which leads to model collapse.
Pardon me? You cannot be serious...
https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/08/2003992823/-1/-1/0/CSA...
Independent verification from non-aligned entities would be a minimum for something like this. Note how in spite of all of the claims not a single lawsuit has been filed.
You cannot believe intelligence agencies when they do not offer proof. Their job is to provide (reputationally but not factually) authoritative story lines that protect big business interests from competition overseas. Sometimes they protect US business by bombing their competitors.
It’s going to be hard for companies to justify paying $1000s per month to frontier providers when they see what’s doable with open versions.
Isn't the first open model that likely surpasses original Mythos from February this week's Kimi K3.1 Pro?
Nothing compares to September's Opus 5.5 yet.
Now the question is whether Anthropic is preparing another phenomenal upgrade with Fable 5.5, or if the progress eventually slows down and competitors catch up.
I've rarely heard the opinion that for heavy agentic work, Opus wasn't noticeably better.