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.