Anthropic reports that new defensive measures have reduced the amount of Claude reasoning data harvested by illicit distillers by roughly 90 to 99%. Distillation attacks involve covert, industrial-scale campaigns where foreign labs use fraudulent account networks to extract Claude's hidden reasoning transcripts and train smaller models to mimic frontier capabilities. Anthropic has deployed three categories of defenses: "preserved thinking" restrictions that prevent reasoning blocks from being moved between conversations, models, or accounts; a two-stage constitutional classifier that detects extraction attempts with under 0.1% false positives; and usage-limit and account-ban policies for repeat offenders. The company acknowledges trade-offs, including forfeiting meaningful revenue and requiring some developers to update integrations.
- Zhipu distilled cyber capabilities from US models for GLM-5.3, which NIST assessed as the most cyber-capable open-weights model released to date
- One distillation network managed over 20,000 fraudulent accounts simultaneously
- A PLA-affiliated user leveraged the Kimi distillation pipeline to analyze CCTV surveillance of a specific individual
- Zhipu distilled cyber capabilities from US models for GLM-5.3, which NIST assessed as the most cyber-capable open-weights model released to date
- One distillation network managed over 20,000 fraudulent accounts simultaneously
- A PLA-affiliated user leveraged the Kimi distillation pipeline to analyze CCTV surveillance of a specific individual
Google is accusing others of cloning its Gemini AI, despite its own history of scraping data without permission to train its models. This raises questions of hypocrisy as companies compete to protect their AI investments and differentiate their offerings, facing challenges like model distillation and the potential for smaller entities to compete.
