OpenAI and Anthropic have been on the warpath lately against third-party efforts to train new AI models by prompting their publicly-accessible chatbots and APIs, a process known as “distillation.”
That conversation has focused on Chinese firms using distillation to create open-weight models that are nearly as capable as U.S. offerings, but available at a much lower cost. However, tech workers have widely assumed that American labs use these techniques on each other to avoid falling behind competitors.
