Weights are not required for distillation. I'm not sure how you came to that belief. Distillation is training a student model to minimic a teacher model output.

Weights are not required for distillation. I'm not sure how you came to that belief. Distillation is training a student model to minimic a teacher model output. Anthropic, for example, posted a 2026 disclosure (https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) which singles out DeepSeek's distillation activity. They detected over 16M actions over 24,000 fraudulent accounts. That's just what they detected.