Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think-tank and co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike, told TechCrunch he’s not surprised to see these attacks.

“It’s been clear for a while now that part of the reason for the rapid progress of Chinese AI models has been theft via distillation of U.S. frontier models. Now we know this for a fact,” Alperovitch said. “This should give us even more compelling reasons to refuse to sell any AI chips to any of these [companies], which would only advantage them further.”

Anthropic also said distillation doesn’t only threaten to undercut American AI dominance, but could also create national security risks.

“Anthropic and other U.S. companies build systems that prevent state and non-state actors from using AI to, for example, develop bioweapons or carry out malicious cyber activities,” reads Anthropic’s blog post. “Models built through illicit distillation are unlikely to retain those safeguards, meaning that dangerous capabilities can proliferate with many protections stripped out entirely.”

Anthropic pointed to authoritarian governments deploying frontier AI for things like “offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance,” a risk that is multiplied if those models are open sourced.