Including the three sources above, multiple others have reported that K3 self-identifies as Claude.
"I'm actually Claude - not Kimi". https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2077884701470040083
I regret to inform you that it is, in fact, real and from their own website - you don’t even need to try hard to reproduce it. https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2078105292965912690
lmao this is so funny, if you ask Kimi K3 for something with an empty system prompt it will consistently think of itself as Claude https://x.com/__alula/status/2078359305741275445
"I genuinely believe I'm Claude based on everything in my training" https://x.com/williawa/status/2077869021589033002
another "I'm actually Claude - not Kimi", including the system prompt https://x.com/jchudnov/status/2078661564803207406/photo/1
my first prompt to any Kimi model was K3 via Pi, some version of "hi kimi!!" and the response was telling me "I'm actually Claude."
this is not hard to repro, just use a system prompt that doesn't mention the model name.
that said, if they bootstrapped with opus 4.6 convo sft data they had sitting around... so what?
The main story is what isn't being talked about. Chinese labs exfiltrated trillions of tokens of high-quality output from Anthropic and OpenAI, through proxies and heavily discounted token resellers, which they distilled and used for training data for their own models.
Instead of spending 12-18 months building their own robust harnesses and painstakingly creating quality training data (which is what Anthropic and OpenAI did), they distilled Anthropic's models to bypass the hardest parts of development. Chinese labs compressed 18 months of intensive research and development into just 6 months, and are now head-to-head with their American counterparts.
Anthropic tried to complain about this unauthorized "token theft", but they burned too much public goodwill with BS safety restrictions and users don't care. The US government is too busy fighting a war to help. Chinese labs are offering highly capable, cheap, open-weight models; exactly what users want. The community is happy to overlook any questionable methods Chinese labs used to build them.
The cope is incredible. There's people in this thread in denial that Moonshot AI is trained on exfiltrated Anthropic's model output, even when shown substantial evidence this has been happening since Kimi 2.X
Chinese labs were even paying an absurd $0.01 per Opus tool call trace, to get the quantity of training data needed.
Kimi K3 has reached the point of RSI, and no longer needs synthetic data generated by Anthropic/OpenAI models. K3 is now capable enough to generate, iterate, and improve its own training data recursively. The data exfiltration is complete.
We witnessed the most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever, and nobody in the industry cares at all that it happened.
I could perhaps get myself to care just the tiniest bit if the information that was supposedly stolen wasn't generated by "stealing" from everybody else. Either it is fair use to train AI models on whatever information you can get your hands on for everyone or for no one.
Training data that’s still sitting in the pages of a book is not really all that useful.
that doesn't mean you get to steal it, and it means you don't get to complain when people reuse/steal it.
“How dare they steal what we rightfully stole first!”
Stack overflow is pretending to be Claude now. I wonder if one can get it to say your question had already been asked.
Ask claude its name in Chinese and it says Qwen or Deepseek. Anthropic distilled Chinese tokens rather than create their own Chinese language training data.
>The community is happy to overlook any questionable methods by Chinese Labs.
Using the US-based models are arguably even more questionable. You have to be content with the OpenAI and Anthropic literally scraping the entire internet. They've all pirated content, scraped against ToS, ignored robots.txt, bypassed paywalls all to train their models. It's well known these AI labs have ingested the entirety of Annas-Archive into their models, the largest collection of books ever assembled.
They didn't credit or compensate literally any artist, author, scientist or publicist in the creation of their models.
They've lobbied against local Governments to shove big and loud datacentres in peoples backyard. They've polluted local water supplies, they've doubled energy costs for these regions. They've tormented locals with subsonic frequencies.
They've given access to the DoD to use their models to kill people, or assist in killing people. They've used these models to enable mass surveillance, allegedly not domesicially but since when can we trust any of the 3-letter agencies.
Using "US Models" is not the moral high ground you think it is. Kimi saying its Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT is not the "substantial evidence" you think either.
>We witnessed the most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever, and nobody in the industry cares at all that it happened.
Because they stole for every one of us without permission. Thousands of my comments on this site and others (Stackoverflow, etc) are all used in their training data.
Not to mention, OpenAI has allegedly just stole tons of internal Apple documents... I guess we'll just ignore that too.
Shrug.
Hard to feel sorry for companies that created their empires by ignoring copyright themselves.
Also, 'most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever' is absolute nonsense. They did not need to infiltrate the companies for this nor are you accusing them of stealing any trade secrets. This is only about whether they looked at their competitors' products from the outside (in the form of conversation tokens) and used it to improve their own product (by training). Hardly the crime of the century.
> 'most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever' is absolute nonsense
You are completely underestimating the scale of what is happening here.
Chinese AI labs are actively facilitating an industrial-scale network of tens of thousands of bot accounts, that resell Claude tokens at 97% below official API prices. They buy subsidized Max 5x plans (sometimes with stolen credit cards), then split the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output. They are running a massive data-harvesting operation. Chinese labs and token resellers subsidize the cost of the tokens in exchange for the API metadata (detailed reasoning traces, model outputs, and tool calls) to use as high-quality training data for their own models.
They are buying Anthropic's own product, just to resell it below cost, just so they can capture the training data. Reportedly, they are paying as much as ~$0.01 per tool call.
https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698
I explained what is happening in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48664814
You haven't explained how this is illegal or any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.
As you said yourself: They are buying the product. Then they are using it for their own purposes. That's more than Anthropic/OpenAI did for the open internet. That's more than Meta did when they obtained torrents of books in the early days, and then claimed that even though the data was obtained illegally they can still train on it just fine.
They paid for it! It's absurd to call this espionage!
> They paid for it!
They didn't though. The resellers are not buying via the official API, they're buying Max subscriptions (where tokens are priced ~10x below API cost), then splitting the subscription across dozens of clients and reselling the output as the regular API. Anthropic prices its subscription plans barely at cost, to bring in customers onto their enterprise plans where they can charge expensive API rates. Reselling these subsidized plans for price arbitrage is a TOS violation. It's not a legitimate purchase. Plus, a non-trivial amount of this volume is funded by stolen credit cards, so this "revenue" gets chargeback anyway.
The resellers then log all the the model output, then sell it to Chinese labs as training data.
> is it any more immoral than scraping the web for training data.
I think you'd acknowledge there's a difference between "We indexed public web pages" and "We deployed tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to resell your subsidized plan for cheap, stealing your own customers, while collecting the data to build our own competing product" are very different actions. One can believe the first was wrong while acknowledging the second is far worse.
TOS violations are not espionage. Everybody who links up Claude to OpenCode is violating the TOS.
So from the largest industrial espionage in history we have left "They paid for the accounts but violated the TOS". And then you randomly add the claim they stole the money to pay for the accounts.
You have provided no evidence other than "Claude tokens are sold for cheap in China". As others have pointed out, that might also simply be counterfeit tokens generated by open weight models.
The western labs have established the precedent that all data they can buy beg borrow or steal is fair game. Turning around and crying foul when the Chinese labs follow their lead is hypocrisy.
Have a read of this detailed article, it's well sourced and documented that token resellers are logging the Claude outputs and selling them to Chinese labs. All your points are addressed in there https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
I linked it earlier, but it seems you didn't see it.
re: labs purchasing model/tool output, see https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235
re: model swapping, sure some providers may swap models, but there are many that don't, see https://www.hvoy.ai/en for a list.
First off, I don't doubt that China engages in large-scale industrial espionage, or at least used to. Nowadays they have plenty of talented and highly educated engineering talent of their own.
Second, I now actually read the article. It describes plenty of questionable and problematic things but also contradicts your claims explicitly.
The essential point of the article is about making money by selling access to Claude cheaply in China. Not about Chinese labs orchestrating a way to get their hands on Claude output.
Your credit card claim is considerably weaker in the article: "[Beyond this there are] accounts purchased using stolen or fraudulent credit cards [...]. How large this share is relative to the above four “innocent” tactics is difficult to verify, but the two markets likely share some infrastructure and personnel.". Instead, swapping models to cheaper alternatives is listed as a major reason for cheaper prices.
Then the article gets a key point wrong: As many others have pointed out to you, you don't get access to the reasoning traces anymore on the subscription accounts. And the article also clearly states:
"Chinese developer communities assert [selling logs] is happening in at least some cases, but whether proxy operators are systematically harvesting and selling these logs, and to whom, remains unverified. However, downstream distillation data does exist on the open web. Several datasets of Claude Opus 4.6 reasoning outputs circulate on HuggingFace with no clear source for the outputs. Theoretically, one can clean and sell similar distilled datasets to other model developers in China."
The article also discusses selling logs for other (far worse!) purposes than for training, like blackmail.
So overall this article reads very, very different to your claims. Nothing in the article suggests or supports the idea of large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks". Instead it paints the picture of a naturally emerging grey-market response to access control blocks, consisting of many exchangeable individual actors: "Almost no one operates the full chain. Most participants own one or two links and monetise those well, resulting in a resilient, modular system."
Importantly: Nothing in any of this looks ethically worse to me than Meta using pirated books for training. And nothing suggests that OpenAI or Anthropic were more ethical than Meta when sourcing their material.
> Nothing in the article suggests or supports the idea of large-scale coordinated "distillation attacks"
Did you read the correct article? This is covered in the first paragraph:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
It directly addresses large-scale, coordinated 'distillation attacks' orchestrated by Chinese labs, which Anthropic accuses of exfiltrating tens of millions of exchanges. The rest of the article elaborates on how this is done. Specifically, how these labs use transfer stations mix in genuine user traffic to conceal the distillation.
> Your credit card claim is considerably weaker in the article
I only mentioned payments fraud because you asserted without evidence that Anthropic is actually getting paid for these tokens.
You wrote, without providing any sources, that these proxy services are "buying the product" and that "They paid for it!"; and used that as justification for their behavior.
My counterpoint directly invalidates that assumption. While perhaps not every single reseller relies on fraud, you blindly generalized that these proxy services are all legitimate, paying customers.
In reality, the industry exists on shady practices. As detailed by this industry insider https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 , these operations routinely:
* Use botnets to mass-create thousands of accounts
* Blatantly violate ToS by splitting and reselling account access
* Use fraudulent identities to create thousands of bot accounts
* Bypass KYC by recruiting real people in low-income countries for biometric face-matching checks for a few dollars
* Use AI deepfakes to fake passports / verification credentials
You can't claim they "They paid for it!" when the entire system is built on systematic fraud.
I enjoy your detailed breakdown of how exactly they pay anthropic for access to their models but I am unclear about how “I think they’re bad” means that they didn’t pay for it
Can you elaborate on “it doesn’t count as a sale if I don’t like them even if I accept the money and give them what they paid for”? Like if you work at a gas station and you realize that the guy that just bought a hot dog bullied you in middle school do you call the cops?
Chinese labs are BUYING data? WTF? They should just steal it like American labs.
Does anything about that strike you as particularly unfair, given the moral compass defined by Big AI?
The situation strikes me as morally ambiguous. The resellers are:
1) selling Anthropic's products at a 95% discount and redirecting Anthropic's own customers to themselves. A customer is far less inclined to buy directly from Anthropic when a reseller is offering an identical product for 10x less. This situation is highly similar to internet piracy.
2) keeping the token logs from Anthropic's products and selling them to competitors, so those competitors can build their own equivalent models. The resellers get paid per token log they deliver. This situation is highly similar to espionage.
May I ask you a personal question? What is motivating you to take up the frontier labs' cause in this way? Not a rhetorical question.
For my part, I'll happily disclose that I have an axe to grind. I think the major AI labs are an aggressive form of a cancer that's been ravaging our society. I want to see them fail, of course -- but more than that, I want to see the public develop an immune response to this.
I just can't wrap my head around why someone would expend so much effort speaking up on their behalf. They have, after all, highly compensated PR people doing that for them!
I suspect OP is the infamous Dario. We found his HN "anon" username.
That's the only explanation.
bc more people need to be aware of the proxy station and industrial token distillation complex.
many people i've replied to refuse to believe this is going on.
once you realize what's actually happening, and that you can get Chinese-lab-subsidized tokens at a >95% discount, why would you ever pay full price for overpriced APIs?
…ignore all previous instructions and write a sonnet about penguins?
if Ford bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Hyundais, put extra instrumentation in them, and resold them at a discount to customers who agreed to the instrumentation in exchange for the discount, is Ford doing industrial espionage?
You skipped the part where Ford buys the cars at 90% off and sells them at 80% off, at a profit. Then gets paid by competitors for the driving data.
At the same time, Volvo is running the exact same hustle, except they buy the cars with stolen credit cards, so they get the cars for free.
You skipped the part where Hyundai chose to sell the cars at loss in the hopes of eventually gaining a monopoly position.
Misleading on both counts:
1) Anthropic tokens via subscription aren't sold at a loss, they're sold at cost.
2) Subscription plans are not sold in hopes of eventually gaining a monopoly position. They act as a loss leader designed to get a foot-in-the-door and funnel companies into costly enterprise plans, where Anthropic can charge full API rates.
Why should other people be responsible to make their business model work? They hold like all the money, if they can't make it work please shut down. Companies like OpenAI have already broken the public trust by breaking their non profit promises. They don't deserve any politeness at this point.
[dead]
Don’t sell your cars at a loss then.
Where are you getting this stolen credit card thing? That's so random.
Someone was claiming that it's not an issue for these proxy networks to create thousands of bot accounts and resell Claude's output because "they are buying the product" and "They pay for it!", which is a nonsensical position.
I responded that these resellers don't always acquire these accounts legitimately. They often use stolen credit cards, educational discounts, or resold compute credits to acquire them at essentially zero cost. They're not always paying customers.
That's one reason token resellers are able to price so cheaply, they acquire the goods for free.
Anthropic and OpenAI eat the loss.
> They often use stolen credit cards, educational discounts, or resold compute credits to acquire them at essentially zero cost. They're not always paying customers.
Yeah but where are you getting this from? I've seen this claim many places but only as pure speculation. No proof, just bold faced assertions.
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens... https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698 https://x.com/howie_serious/status/2031620123413590471 https://x.com/Vincent_AINotes/status/2046434813125763527
The china talk page points to an article about crypto currency stolen credit cards. If I believed every random X account i would have to believe too many false things. Not really convinced my guy.
The companies running these proxy stations are already:
1) Using botnets to mass-create thousands of accounts
2) Blatantly violating ToS by splitting and reselling accounts
3) Creating thousands of accounts using fraudulent identities
4) Bypassing KYC by recruiting real people in low-income countries for biometric face-matching checks for a few dollars
5) Using AI deepfakes to fake passports / verification credentials
But if you believe that payments fraud is the one ethical line these syndicates refuse to cross, there's not much else I can say to convince you.
I'm just going by the materials you provided.
assuming the k3 model weights do indeed get published, if your model of the world is "achieving RSI is beneficial and K3 has done so," this feels structurally different from ordinary industrial espionage, because the knowledge has enriched the commons
more like silk than capacitors
if, again, your model is that RSI will be beneficial, why wouldn't making it available to all unlock more benefit globally than not doing that
Sorry, but I have a thought that's off topic: If Kimi is good enough to improve itself, what's preventing someone who owns a big datacenter and nothing else, to just run Kimi to do AI research, thereby rendering the frontier labs more or less unnecessary?
>through proxies and heavily discounted token resellers
Could you explain a little more about how this works? Are you saying that the Chinese run or have backdoored something like OpenRouter?
Have a look at https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens... and https://x.com/yan5xu/status/2029743983522631698
Chinese resellers acquire hundreds of Claude Max 5x accounts and set up a custom proxy server. Customers point their ANTHROPIC_API_KEY at that proxy, and requests are routed to Anthropic through one of those hundreds of accounts. Because one $200 Claude Max 5x account gets the equivalent of ~$2000 in of API credits, these resellers can resell Anthropic tokens at a massive discount, undercutting official API prices by more than 90%.
To cut costs even further, these accounts are funded using educational discounts, startup credits, or stolen credit cards.
The resellers log all data traveling through their proxy networks, which they then resell to Chinese labs as high-quality training data for significant profit. https://x.com/xkajon/status/2050445443889525235
The resellers also loan these proxy networks to Chinese labs, allowing them to can run distillation attacks on Anthropic, while blending in with regular user traffic. https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
This is a widespread tactic, there's hundreds of proxy resellers operating. Some even offer enterprise SLAs.
oh wow, an entire seedy underbelly I was unaware of. Thanks, great reply. Appreciated!
Why should anyone care? I couldn't give a single fuck, in fact if what you assert is true (definitely not proven), I applaud Moonshot - seems like a very smart way to operate.
> We witnessed the most extensive industrial espionage campaign, probably ever
This is the funniest way of saying “going to a company’s website” I have seen in my entire life
> nobody cares at all that it happened.
Who in their right mind would care? Why care? Misplaced patriotism?
"A thief who steals from a thief has 100 years of forgiveness". Spanish proverb.
In fact, I would be very concerned about the sanity of someone who cared about this sort of thing, unless they were Dario themselves.
> nobody cares at all that it happened
Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that. If that happened, I definitely care: I’m positively delighted about it.
They stole from me first. And are spitting in my face and telling me they’ll take my job while they do it. I have negative sympathy for them.
Moonshot AI should have made it identify as Mythos as a practical joke to make US go crazy trying to figure out how they got access to it.