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OpenAI's Astra becomes the main target for Chinese AI labs after Anthropic tightens its defenses

According to The Information, Chinese AI labs are now mainly tapping OpenAI's most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, instead of Anthropic's Claude, to distill outputs for training their latest models. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI reportedly leaned heavily on Astra, including for Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017. This kind of distillation requires the models to reveal their hidden reasoning steps, which OpenAI and Anthropic both ban. Claude used to be the go-to target, but Anthropic has tightened its defenses, saying its new methods cut the amount of data attackers can pull by 90 to 99 percent. In late September, OpenAI reported a coordinated distillation campaign it says involved people linked to Moonshot. Moonshot declined to comment and DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment.

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ArticleThe Decoder

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