Why Anthropic is right to fear Chinese AI distillation

US AI leader Anthropic has accused China’s Alibaba of “illicitly” copying the knowledge from its Claude model in a process called distillation. Here’s what that means – and why companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have so much to fear from the practice .

Tech Gets Real is a show about staying in control in a time of rapid technological change, presented from a European perspective. I'm veteran tech journalist David Meyer, and I've been covering tech policy for two decades. If you like this, please hit like and subscribe, and share it with others who might find it useful.

REFERENCES:

Wikipedia article on Prohibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

Wall Street Journal on Anthropic’s Alibaba accusation https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claims-alibaba-ran-brazen-campaign-to-access-its-claude-ai-model-69d7a392

Alibaba’s Qwen terms of service https://qwen.ai/termsservice

Wired’s transcript of Elon Musk’s OpenAI lawsuit appearance https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-distill-openai-models-partly-xai/

DeepSeek’s distillation announcement in early 2025 https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-r1

Nathan Lambert on Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 https://www.interconnects.ai/p/glm-52-is-the-step-change-for-open