Anthropic misanthropic toward China's AI labswww.theregister.com: Says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax are using 'distillation' to gin up their own models

Having built a business by remixing content created by others, Anthropic worries that Chinese AI labs are stealing its data.

The US-based maker of Claude models on Monday accused China-based DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of conducting "industrial-scale campaigns" to siphon knowledge from its models through a technique known as "distillation."

Model distillation is a deep learning technique in which a large "teacher" model can be made to transfer its learned patterns to a smaller "student" model. It's a form of data compression that ideally produces a smaller, more efficient model without significant performance loss. Useful for explainable AI – shining a light into black box algorithms – it's also a handy way to copy a model.