alt.hn

2/23/2026 at 6:58:27 PM

Alleged Distillation Attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax

 https://twitter.com/anthropicai/status/2025997929840857390

by mike_kamau

2/23/2026 at 9:30:25 PM

I don't think this counts as distillation. Distillation is when you use a teacher model to train a student model, but crucially, you have access to the entire probability distribution of the generated tokens, not just to the tokens themselves. That probability distribution increases tremendously the strength of the signal, so the training converges much faster. Claude does not provide these probabilities. So, Claude was used for synthetic training data generation, but not really for distillation.

by credit_guy

2/23/2026 at 11:19:05 PM

Sampling repeatedly gives them an estimate of the probability distribution in any case though.

by hooloovoo_zoo

2/23/2026 at 11:24:30 PM

That would be an interesting paper actually; what is the optimal sampling technique given you only have access to the token outputs. Surely someone has already done it.

by hooloovoo_zoo

2/23/2026 at 7:12:40 PM

So it's okay when big American corps raid the internet ignoring any terms of service or licenses they see in order to train models they rent back to us, but when a foreign entity trains off of Anthropic it's illegal?

by exq

2/23/2026 at 8:19:03 PM

From the tweet, Anthropic's point is that distillation is Ok, unless new model has safeguards removed or used for military or surveillance purposes.

by riku_iki

2/23/2026 at 8:50:48 PM

The fact that they're calling it an "attack" implies otherwise.

I find the entire premise of this announcement absurd. Fraudulent accounts? They're just accounts. They paid for the access the same as any other. They're accessing Claude just like a human (or *claw) would.

There's no argument against their strategy that doesn't make them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place.

by dmonitor

2/23/2026 at 9:19:17 PM

> them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place.

sure, hypocrisies is part of rules for big games: politics and business.

> Fraudulent accounts? They're just accounts.

they tell the story in blog post, that they don't allow claude in China, but those labs use some proxy services to access claude and mix traffic with regular users to hids its activities

by riku_iki

2/23/2026 at 8:47:16 PM

I don’t think so. It reads much more like “distillation is okay when you do it to your own models.”

by _aavaa_

2/23/2026 at 9:06:53 PM

Pot, meet kettle!

I don’t think I’m the only one feeling some schadenfreude at this news. I suppose it’s ok when you’re a hot Silicon Valley scale-up to slurp up the rest of the worlds data for free and then hire hot shot lawyers to defend you against all the creatives you ripped off, but when it’s the “evil” Chinese doing the same to you it’s a dastardly “attack”?

by saberience