> I think the more reasonable explanation is this is totally made up.
Based on what? None of the accused companies have ever denied Anthropic's accusations. And here you are confidently claiming it all to be made it. How much of a reputational hit to one's honesty do you think it carries to completely fabricate someone doing something, when they can just publicly disagree and disprove you? First thing DeepSeek, Moonshot, etc. would do if they hadn't would be to make a press statement calling out Anthropic for their lies.
DeepSeek routing to Fable was corroborated by many independent sources... since... everyone was able to just try it out and see it for themselves.
> Oh no!!! The scary asians are distilling our models, but they only want the scary things!!!
The straw man you're mocking doesn't exist. Non-Chinese labs are also distilling frontier models of their competitors. Elon testified in court that Grok was trained on ChatGPT outputs. And why would they not? It produces objectively better models.
Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
Yeah, I'd expect every lab to use the resources at their disposal to get ahead. Everyone's distilling everyone else, there's nothing wrong with it.
Despite being "corroborated by independent sources," it was impossible - because deepseek has a higher TPS, can return logits and reveals thinking. Distillation happens asynchronously.
DeepSeek's Anthropic compatible endpoint doesn't return logits. The accusation is that requests to api.deepseek.com/anthropic coming from Claude Code or OpenCode just replayed Claude's responses sometimes. The clients would have just happily consumed the responses, as they were already meant to be Anthropic compatible. And yeah, TPS and the response-distribution were incredibly different between DeepSeek and Claude models, which is exactly why people noticed.
Multi-turn conversations have much more entropy than one-shot responses, making it more useful to do synchronous distillation.
So people were getting deepseek responses with long waits and no thinking traces? That would be easy to prove, we'd get more than just claims from interested entities.
When did I say everything is a grand conspiracy? This whole thing where centrists normies just call anyone who believes something outside their center comfort zone a conspiracy theorist is mega obnoxious.
You need better media literacy.
You cant just make up a reality where none of these companies have denied distillation.
The scary asians are going to get you, watch out! Your government is going to eventually tell you that we need kill a bunch of them too because they're so scary. Probably soonish. You're going to fall for it because you believe anything you're told.
You are postulating an organised psyop, where OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly lying about Chinese labs to paint an image of, in your words: "Oh no!!! The scary asians are distilling our models, but they only want the scary things!!!"
These lies are then further supported publicly my western media, random people on twitter, western governments, etc., all to paint China as an evil force that must be united against. Again, in your words "Your government is going to eventually tell you that we need kill a bunch of them too because they're so scary."
And you have dozens of independent parties pushing that same lie to that end and for that purpose? Sure, that's what the New York Times and CNBC must deeply want too. When CNBC writes that they've reached out for comments to the accused companies, but received no responses, they must be lying as well?
It shouldn't be hard for you to demonstrate DeepSeek denying it. Please, go ahead, link to a statement. China's foreign ministry has denied Chinese labs distilling, and, in the same statement accused US labs of distilling from Chinese models. Now that's a very trustworthy claim.
I call it a conspiracy theory because it's a conspiracy theory. Some conspiracies are true, but this one is not. Distilling is both trivially simple and produces objectively better models. Plenty of evidence points to that practice. But in your mind the labs in China are just morally too upstanding in engage in such lowly tactics to create better models, despite the evidence. And it's convenient that the evidence can be explained away by claiming it to be a psyop to paint Chinese as evil.