GoKawiil
Tech News
A researcher preparing policy-facing writing on open AI models has compiled and shared a curated list of the best writing on the topic from recent years, organized into sections covering foundational concepts, US-China competition, and technical details like distillation. The list is described as a living document that will be updated as readers suggest additional pieces to include.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan told CNBC he opposes any regulatory crackdown on AI model distillation, even suggesting U.S. open-weight labs should distill from American frontier labs the way Chinese firms reportedly do. His comments come as Anthropic released a report accusing Chinese labs of illicit distillation attacks using stolen credentials, with CEO Dario Amodei calling for regulators to intervene.
Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg, roughly double its reported run rate in August. The push is fueled by strong adoption of its open-weight K3 model, which OpenRouter data shows generating up to 300 billion tokens daily, even as usage has dipped slightly in recent months.
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, said at the accelerator's Demo Day that regulators should take no action against AI model distillation, even as OpenAI and Anthropic accuse Chinese firms like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of copying their models' outputs to train cheaper alternatives. His comments come days after the NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory warning about the practice.
Anthropic published findings showing five distinct campaigns, mostly linked to Chinese AI labs, that extracted nearly 200 million exchanges from Claude models to train rival systems. The largest, attributed to Alibaba, alone generated 151 million exchanges between May and recent months, using tricks like disguised translation requests to expose the model's hidden reasoning steps.
Anthropic alleges that Chinese AI firms DeepSeek and Moonshot created thousands of fake accounts to funnel millions of real user queries into its models, a technique known as distillation used to replicate its AI's capabilities without building them independently. The company claims this activity violated its usage policies and represents a large-scale attempt to extract proprietary model behavior through automated querying.
The NSA, CISA, and FBI jointly identified six Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI—as running large-scale campaigns since late 2024 to extract the underlying capabilities of leading US AI systems like Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. The agencies said these firms likely operated with the Chinese government's awareness and used tactics such as mass fake-account API abuse and prompt injection to expose hidden reasoning processes.
US federal agencies issued a joint advisory on Sept. 8 alleging that Chinese AI companies including Alibaba, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, StepFun and Z.AI have run large-scale operations to pull outputs from US models like Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024. The advisory says these firms extracted billions of tokens through millions of queries, using techniques such as chain-of-thought extraction and automated evasion to dodge blocking measures, in order to train their own competing systems.
CISA, the NSA, and the FBI issued a joint advisory naming DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI as having harvested billions of tokens from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI models since late 2024. The firms allegedly used fraudulent accounts, proxy networks, and automated failover systems to bypass rate limits and extract restricted reasoning data at industrial scale.
The NSA, CISA and FBI issued a joint advisory alleging that Chinese AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since 2024. The agencies say this data was used to train competing systems like DeepSeek's R1 and Moonshot's Kimi K2/K3, describing the practice as 'distillation activities at an industrial scale.'
U.S. security agencies have publicly accused six Chinese artificial intelligence companies of systematically using American AI models to train their own systems through a technique known as distillation. The practice allows a smaller model to learn from the outputs of a larger, more advanced one, effectively transferring capabilities without the original research investment.
The NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory alleging that Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, have run large-scale campaigns since 2024 to extract capabilities from leading US models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. The agencies say these firms used millions of queries routed through multiple accounts, APIs, proxies, and cloud providers to generate synthetic training data and build competing models such as DeepSeek's R1/R3 and Moonshot's Kimi-K2/K3.