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I strongly agree with the premise that distillation is not an “attack”. But that said: K3 is not a distilled version of Fable or Sol. Fable has been barely ava

I strongly agree with the premise that distillation is not an “attack”. But that said: K3 is not a distilled version of Fable or Sol. Fable has been barely available and Sol was just released! Moreover, K3 is superior to both models in some domains, according to user scoring on the Arena. API distillation can’t give you these results anyway. All it is useful for is bootstrapping RL in new domains to get past the “cold start” problem faster. By far, what matters more is the quality and variety of RL environments the model learns from.

tristanj 3mo ago
API distillation doesn't have to explain all of K3's capabilities for it to have happened. Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870 https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870 This behavior is exactly what you'd expect from a model distilled from Claude. There's a detailed analysis of K3's ambiguous identity here: https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/writeups/write_up.md https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/... This analysis observed K3 identifies itself as Claude approximately 15% of the time. K3 reproduces Claude's correct current model id, which the real Claude models themselves do not emit. This suggests K3 was trained on Claude data labeled with deployment metadata (API logs, tagged synthetic data), rather than Claude's chat outputs. And there's an entire Reddit thread discussing Kimi's similarities with Claude https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1m2w5ge/did_kimi_k2_train_on_claudes_generated_code_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1m2w5ge/did_kim... This analysis shows K3 and Opus/Fable have unexpected correlated outputs https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full
- deminature 3mo ago
  It does not reproducibly identify itself as Claude, there's evidence to the contrary in the very thread you linked: https://x.com/bobbyNewcomb5/status/2078151562828947954 https://x.com/bobbyNewcomb5/status/2078151562828947954
  - tristanj 3mo ago
    As mentioned in my comment, Kimi K3 identifies itself as Claude ~15% of the time. Here's another report of K3 identifying itself as Claude https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901 https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901 And an analysis showing the self-identity distribution for K3 and other models https://x.com/RyanGreenblatt/status/2078663148509544589 https://x.com/RyanGreenblatt/status/2078663148509544589
    - deminature 3mo ago
      Your main source is Ryan Greenblatt who is a regular recipient of community notes and has no corroboration for the 15% statistic other than his assertion. The other tweet (Sauers_) is also community noted as engagement farming with a false system prompt, so forgive me for being skeptical.
      - tristanj 3mo ago
        Including the three sources above, multiple others have reported that K3 self-identifies as Claude. "I'm actually Claude - not Kimi". https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2077884701470040083 https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2077884701470040083 I regret to inform you that it is, in fact, real and from their own website - you don’t even need to try hard to reproduce it. https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2078105292965912690 https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2078105292965912690 lmao this is so funny, if you ask Kimi K3 for something with an empty system prompt it will consistently think of itself as Claude https://x.com/__alula/status/2078359305741275445 https://x.com/__alula/status/2078359305741275445 "I genuinely believe I'm Claude based on everything in my training" https://x.com/williawa/status/2077869021589033002 https://x.com/williawa/status/2077869021589033002 another "I'm actually Claude - not Kimi", including the system prompt https://x.com/jchudnov/status/2078661564803207406/photo/1 https://x.com/jchudnov/status/2078661564803207406/photo/1
        remexre 3mo ago
        my first prompt to any Kimi model was K3 via Pi, some version of "hi kimi!!" and the response was telling me "I'm actually Claude." this is not hard to repro, just use a system prompt that doesn't mention the model name. that said, if they bootstrapped with opus 4.6 convo sft data they had sitting around... so what?
- johndough 3mo ago
  But then again, the identity could also have slipped into the model from other sources during pretraining. The internet is full of "I am Claude": https://grep.app/search?q=i+am+claude https://grep.app/search?q=i+am+claude and variants https://grep.app/search?q=i%27m+claude https://grep.app/search?q=i%27m+claude Either way, there's probably no significant portion of Mythos/Fable or Sol in there as OP has stated.
  - tristanj 3mo ago
    When prefaced with "I am Claude", Kimi K3 prefers to generate API-specific Anthropic model identifiers, unlike other models Qwen, GPT, or even Claude itself. These exact identifiers appear in Claude API metadata, and are stripped out of Claude web chats. While other models produce human-readable names like "Opus 4.5" or "Sonnet 4", Kimi K3 produces exact API model identifier like "claude-opus-4-5-20251101" or "claude-sonnet-4-20250514". Which is extremely unusual. Web chats only contain the human-readable model name. Other models don't do this. So where did K3 get this data? We can conclude, with high confidence, that: 1) K3 was trained on raw Claude API calls/metadata. 2) Claude API metadata was trained on in additional to standard web data.
    - johndough 3mo ago
      The exact model identifiers appear extremely frequently in code on GitHub. https://grep.app/search?q=claude-opus-4-5-20251101 https://grep.app/search?q=claude-opus-4-5-20251101 https://grep.app/search?q=claude-sonnet-4-20250514 https://grep.app/search?q=claude-sonnet-4-20250514 They also appear elsewhere on the internet: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=claude-opus-4-5-20251101,claude-sonnet-4-20250514&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=claude-opus-4-5-2...
      - tristanj 3mo ago
        Those links actually weaken your argument. ~3000 instances over the entirety of GitHub is not "extremely frequent" at all when you consider massive scale of the pretraining corpus. These models are trained on all text on the accessible internet plus millions of books, on trillions of words overall. ~3000 instances isn't even a rounding error. Also, Google Trends is the wrong tool for this case. The link you replied with measures the number of Google searches for a specific query, which is completely irrelevant to how often a string actually appears on the web. I looked at those links. They show random GitHub code samples which contain this model identifier. Even if K3 did train on those GitHub code samples, those are random code strings and K3 isn’t just reciting random pieces of code. When prefilled with "I am Claude", K3 answers with Anthropic's exact backend API identifiers, instead of the human conversational-style name "Opus 4.5". If this was a result of scraping the open web and GitHub, other frontier models trained on GitHub data (like Qwen, Claude, GPT) would show a similar API model name when prompted. But they don't. Only K3 does this behavior, and it prefers to answer with the exact API tags like "claude-opus-4-5-20251101" and "claude-sonnet-4-20250514". A LLM doesn't suddenly output a rare API model identifier when prompted with "I am Claude", just because it saw it in a .py file. No, it only does this because that identifier must have appeared rather frequently in the training data. Which is what happens when you distill Claude models, and don't properly clean your distillation data. Plus, this isn't just spurious speculation that Moonshot is distilling Claude. Anthropic caught Moonshot as running "industrial-scale" distillation campaign from Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist... To quote: Moonshot (Kimi models) employed hundreds of fraudulent accounts spanning multiple access pathways. Varied account types made the campaign harder to detect as a coordinated operation. We attributed the campaign through request metadata, which matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff. In a later phase, Moonshot used a more targeted approach, attempting to extract and reconstruct Claude’s reasoning traces. The operation targeted: * Agentic reasoning and tool use * Coding and data analysis * Computer-use agent development * Computer vision
- mukmuk 3mo ago
  fwiw, Gemini 3.5 has identified itself to me as an OpenAI product on multiple occasions.
  - qlte 3mo ago
    Early Grok would also identify as ChatGPT. This has happened with new model releases for years now.
- stymaar 3mo ago
  > Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude It could also be have been trained from collected response datasets. Claude got caught several time responding it was ChatGPT or even Deepseek and I don't think Anthropic has been distealling DeepSeek. > This behavior is exactly what you'd expect from a model distilled from Claude. The opposite actually. If they wanted to distill Claude without getting caught they could just use a regex to change Claude to Kimi in their distillation pipeline!
  - dotancohen 3mo ago
    > distealling Apt typo. Though I am of the opinion that distilling is no different than how extant frontier LLMs have also been trained on other people's data, I could actually see the word distealling becoming useful in discussion.
    - stymaar 3mo ago
      Its not a typo, someone coined that during the DeepSeek R1 hype period and I kept using it since then. I totally agree with you on the fact that it's not morally any different than pre-training. IMHO we should have a legislation that force base models to be released publicly without any restrictions whatsoever as it's basically the product of the whole humanity's intelligence.
    - torginus 3mo ago
      Opus/Sol/Fable are valuable because of their reasoning and coding ability, not their bedside manners. While still not okay, I suspect the latter is what gets stolen by Chinese distillation (and some evidence suggest this happens the other way round with US models talking in Chinese)
  - cobbzilla 3mo ago
    > they could just use a regex to change Claude to Kimi in their distillation pipeline! Jean-Kimi Van Damme would like to have a word with you.
    - 3mo ago
- Grimblewald 3mo ago
  and claude will call itself chatgpt etc. nothing new, all ai labs are immoral and not bound by any reasonable oversight or ethical constraints. All outlaws in their own rights on that front. Absolutely none of them have true rights on the matter of being distilled from given historic and continued behaviour. I'm not sure why this is a talking point at all? We know AI companies steal, the least interesting behaviour among this is them stealing from one another. For me, a far more interesting and important point of conversation on this matter is anthropic buying rare or evwn unique books, processing them for training data, and then destroying the books for others cannot use it as well. Permanemt destruction of priceless primary source materials is so many leagues beyond copying a copy that I cannot fathom it even registering as a discussion point.
  - squidbeak 3mo ago
    > For me, a far more interesting and important point of conversation on this matter is anthropic buying rare or evwn unique books, processing them for training data, and then destroying the books for others cannot use it as well. That's an incredible allegation, and appalling if true. But is it true?
    - pxoe 3mo ago
      It's not an allegation https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop... (if you're talking about the "rare or unique" part, yeah that might be bs) But in my opinion, treating mass produced books like they're this sacred untouchable object is ridiculous. They're not "source" material, they're just a copy as well, and they're not "priceless" by any means. They're very reasonably priced, perhaps even so cheaply priced that books can be bought in bulk in these amounts. Buying used books and doing whatever you want with them is just legal. Used books, that would probably be just laying in some warehouse, or recycled anyway. If there's anything to have gripes with, it's the copyright system that makes it easier to take this legal route.
      - Grimblewald 3mo ago
- StrauXX 3mo ago
  Kimi calling itself claude means nothing. During pre-training, when the model learns to "simulate" the internet text, it will naturally be fed with a bunch of data about Claude and ChatGPT. With the amount of LLM outputs on the internet today, it is not surprising at all that a model would naturally call itself Claude or ChatGPT. You can mitigate that in post-training (or actually in pre-training as well) by training on many examples of what the model should call itself. That being said, getting probably hundreds pf thousands of ChatGPT and Claude examples totally "pirged" out of the weights is going to be difficult and really more hassle than its worth.
  - tristanj 3mo ago
    Sure, but then Qwen should leak that too, and it doesn't. K3 calls itself Claude 7 out of 48 times, Qwen does it 0 out of 48, and the only other model to identify itself as Claude is DeepSeek. and DeepSeek is alleged to also distill from Claude data anyway. So this isn't something every model absorbed from the same web text. And you skipped over the strongest datapoint that K3 is distilled: K3 reproduces Claude's public model identifier under prefill (i.e. "claude-opus-4-5-20251101"). This data does not appear in Claude chat logs, only in API logs. K3 only does this for Claude models and not for any other lab. The real Claude models don't produce their own current public identifier, they only know their previous identifier (i.e. Sonnet 4.5 calls itself "Claude 3.5 Sonnet"). This is highly suggestive of the type of data that K3 was trained on. K3 was very likely trained on Claude metadata traces (API logs, tagged synthetic data). Not web chat logs, those wouldn't include this identifier. And this data wasn't filtered correctly, which is why K3 incorrectly identifies itself as Claude 15% of the time. You can also look at the last link and it's pretty damning: Kimi K3's output has an uncanny similarity to Fable/Opus output. https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full
    - mastazi 3mo ago
      > Qwen should leak that too, and it doesn't. FWIW I had Qwen identifying itself as "a language model made by Google" in one conversation, although I could not reproduce this reliably.
- hnfong 3mo ago
  Claude Sonnet 4.8 reproducibly identifies itself as DeepSeek when asked in Chinese: https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101 https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101 I mean, people can point fingers however they want, and the fact is nobody actually "owns" the data they feed to their LLMs...
- ComplexSystems 3mo ago
  Surprising they didn't clean that from the data before training. It's easy to identify, a simple search->replace gets most of it, and a cheap LLM can identify the edge cases (e.g. avoiding "Claude Shannon" -> "Kimi Shannon" or something).
- mldqj 3mo ago
  > API distillation doesn't have to explain all of K3's capabilities for it to have happened. Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude This means nothing. It's not how LLMs work...
spaceman_2020 3mo ago
The entire debate about distilled vs not distilled is just academic. As an end user, I don’t give a crap how the model was trained as long as it does the job affordably enough I see all of AI as theft anyway so it makes no ontological difference if the theft was from a human or from another AI
lerchmo 3mo ago
If your business leaks to your customers… if you can ask your product for its inner secret sauce and it readily gives away the goose. That is not a moat.
RazorBucksICO 3mo ago
So if you were to imagine the second largest economy in the world, governed by a monolithic politburo, with a long history of barely concealed programs of corporate and academic espionage, what do you think their approach would be to American technology worth trillions? Now take it a step further, this hypothetical government sees itself as the civilization representation of an ethnic group, and regularly attempts to monitor and police that group regardless of where they are in the world. Also, that ethnic group, separated from the motherland by one generation or less, makes up the majority of research labor in American labs. Don’t you think there’s maybe a teeny, tiny chance that their approach is a little more sophisticated than just buying retail subscriptions? Maybe the trade secrets are being exfiltrated directly from the American labs?
- reticulates 3mo ago
  The ego of America to think it is the only place where innovation can happen is pretty funny. Maybe America’s hubris and hostility towards talented foreigners is driving talent towards other countries? China doesn’t need to embed bad actors and spies in Anthropic and OpenAI, the U.S. is sabotaging itself just fine. America was at the forefront of technology because it attracted the best talent from all over the world. The talent is now staying at home, and America is discovering that America is nothing without immigration. OpenAI and Anthropic are filled with Chinese employees because some of the most talented engineers are Chinese, not because they are spies. Unfortunately, that’s the last generation of Chinese talent that America will get, the latest generation are staying in China. Americans should be ashamed of what they have fumbled, not conspiratorial about what China is doing.
  - RazorBucksICO 3mo ago
    If you think the number of US AI lab employees feeding information back to the homeland is zero, you’re terribly naive. There is the kind of money on the table people will absolutely lie, steal, and kill for. There is also not strong evidence that immigration is the source of progress. We issued many more patents in the 19th century than now which was well before Hart-Cellar. The statement that immigration is even declining is not also supported by evidence.

tristanj 3mo ago

API distillation doesn't have to explain all of K3's capabilities for it to have happened. Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870 https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870 This behavior is exactly what you'd expect from a model distilled from Claude. There's a detailed analysis of K3's ambiguous identity here: https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/writeups/write_up.md https://github.com/rgreenblatt/which_claude_is_k3/blob/main/... This analysis observed K3 identifies itself as Claude approximately 15% of the time. K3 reproduces Claude's correct current model id, which the real Claude models themselves do not emit. This suggests K3 was trained on Claude data labeled with deployment metadata (API logs, tagged synthetic data), rather than Claude's chat outputs. And there's an entire Reddit thread discussing Kimi's similarities with Claude https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1m2w5ge/did_kimi_k2_train_on_claudes_generated_code_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1m2w5ge/did_kim... This analysis shows K3 and Opus/Fable have unexpected correlated outputs https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full

deminature 3mo ago
It does not reproducibly identify itself as Claude, there's evidence to the contrary in the very thread you linked: https://x.com/bobbyNewcomb5/status/2078151562828947954 https://x.com/bobbyNewcomb5/status/2078151562828947954
- tristanj 3mo ago
  As mentioned in my comment, Kimi K3 identifies itself as Claude ~15% of the time. Here's another report of K3 identifying itself as Claude https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901 https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901 And an analysis showing the self-identity distribution for K3 and other models https://x.com/RyanGreenblatt/status/2078663148509544589 https://x.com/RyanGreenblatt/status/2078663148509544589
  - deminature 3mo ago
    Your main source is Ryan Greenblatt who is a regular recipient of community notes and has no corroboration for the 15% statistic other than his assertion. The other tweet (Sauers_) is also community noted as engagement farming with a false system prompt, so forgive me for being skeptical.
    - tristanj 3mo ago
      Including the three sources above, multiple others have reported that K3 self-identifies as Claude. "I'm actually Claude - not Kimi". https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2077884701470040083 https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2077884701470040083 I regret to inform you that it is, in fact, real and from their own website - you don’t even need to try hard to reproduce it. https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2078105292965912690 https://x.com/PimDeWitte/status/2078105292965912690 lmao this is so funny, if you ask Kimi K3 for something with an empty system prompt it will consistently think of itself as Claude https://x.com/__alula/status/2078359305741275445 https://x.com/__alula/status/2078359305741275445 "I genuinely believe I'm Claude based on everything in my training" https://x.com/williawa/status/2077869021589033002 https://x.com/williawa/status/2077869021589033002 another "I'm actually Claude - not Kimi", including the system prompt https://x.com/jchudnov/status/2078661564803207406/photo/1 https://x.com/jchudnov/status/2078661564803207406/photo/1
      - remexre 3mo ago
        my first prompt to any Kimi model was K3 via Pi, some version of "hi kimi!!" and the response was telling me "I'm actually Claude." this is not hard to repro, just use a system prompt that doesn't mention the model name. that said, if they bootstrapped with opus 4.6 convo sft data they had sitting around... so what?
johndough 3mo ago
But then again, the identity could also have slipped into the model from other sources during pretraining. The internet is full of "I am Claude": https://grep.app/search?q=i+am+claude https://grep.app/search?q=i+am+claude and variants https://grep.app/search?q=i%27m+claude https://grep.app/search?q=i%27m+claude Either way, there's probably no significant portion of Mythos/Fable or Sol in there as OP has stated.
- tristanj 3mo ago
  When prefaced with "I am Claude", Kimi K3 prefers to generate API-specific Anthropic model identifiers, unlike other models Qwen, GPT, or even Claude itself. These exact identifiers appear in Claude API metadata, and are stripped out of Claude web chats. While other models produce human-readable names like "Opus 4.5" or "Sonnet 4", Kimi K3 produces exact API model identifier like "claude-opus-4-5-20251101" or "claude-sonnet-4-20250514". Which is extremely unusual. Web chats only contain the human-readable model name. Other models don't do this. So where did K3 get this data? We can conclude, with high confidence, that: 1) K3 was trained on raw Claude API calls/metadata. 2) Claude API metadata was trained on in additional to standard web data.
  - johndough 3mo ago
    The exact model identifiers appear extremely frequently in code on GitHub. https://grep.app/search?q=claude-opus-4-5-20251101 https://grep.app/search?q=claude-opus-4-5-20251101 https://grep.app/search?q=claude-sonnet-4-20250514 https://grep.app/search?q=claude-sonnet-4-20250514 They also appear elsewhere on the internet: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=claude-opus-4-5-20251101,claude-sonnet-4-20250514&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=claude-opus-4-5-2...
    - tristanj 3mo ago
      Those links actually weaken your argument. ~3000 instances over the entirety of GitHub is not "extremely frequent" at all when you consider massive scale of the pretraining corpus. These models are trained on all text on the accessible internet plus millions of books, on trillions of words overall. ~3000 instances isn't even a rounding error. Also, Google Trends is the wrong tool for this case. The link you replied with measures the number of Google searches for a specific query, which is completely irrelevant to how often a string actually appears on the web. I looked at those links. They show random GitHub code samples which contain this model identifier. Even if K3 did train on those GitHub code samples, those are random code strings and K3 isn’t just reciting random pieces of code. When prefilled with "I am Claude", K3 answers with Anthropic's exact backend API identifiers, instead of the human conversational-style name "Opus 4.5". If this was a result of scraping the open web and GitHub, other frontier models trained on GitHub data (like Qwen, Claude, GPT) would show a similar API model name when prompted. But they don't. Only K3 does this behavior, and it prefers to answer with the exact API tags like "claude-opus-4-5-20251101" and "claude-sonnet-4-20250514". A LLM doesn't suddenly output a rare API model identifier when prompted with "I am Claude", just because it saw it in a .py file. No, it only does this because that identifier must have appeared rather frequently in the training data. Which is what happens when you distill Claude models, and don't properly clean your distillation data. Plus, this isn't just spurious speculation that Moonshot is distilling Claude. Anthropic caught Moonshot as running "industrial-scale" distillation campaign from Claude: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist... To quote: Moonshot (Kimi models) employed hundreds of fraudulent accounts spanning multiple access pathways. Varied account types made the campaign harder to detect as a coordinated operation. We attributed the campaign through request metadata, which matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff. In a later phase, Moonshot used a more targeted approach, attempting to extract and reconstruct Claude’s reasoning traces. The operation targeted: * Agentic reasoning and tool use * Coding and data analysis * Computer-use agent development * Computer vision
mukmuk 3mo ago
fwiw, Gemini 3.5 has identified itself to me as an OpenAI product on multiple occasions.
- qlte 3mo ago
  Early Grok would also identify as ChatGPT. This has happened with new model releases for years now.
stymaar 3mo ago
> Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude It could also be have been trained from collected response datasets. Claude got caught several time responding it was ChatGPT or even Deepseek and I don't think Anthropic has been distealling DeepSeek. > This behavior is exactly what you'd expect from a model distilled from Claude. The opposite actually. If they wanted to distill Claude without getting caught they could just use a regex to change Claude to Kimi in their distillation pipeline!
- dotancohen 3mo ago
  > distealling Apt typo. Though I am of the opinion that distilling is no different than how extant frontier LLMs have also been trained on other people's data, I could actually see the word distealling becoming useful in discussion.
  - stymaar 3mo ago
    Its not a typo, someone coined that during the DeepSeek R1 hype period and I kept using it since then. I totally agree with you on the fact that it's not morally any different than pre-training. IMHO we should have a legislation that force base models to be released publicly without any restrictions whatsoever as it's basically the product of the whole humanity's intelligence.
  - torginus 3mo ago
    Opus/Sol/Fable are valuable because of their reasoning and coding ability, not their bedside manners. While still not okay, I suspect the latter is what gets stolen by Chinese distillation (and some evidence suggest this happens the other way round with US models talking in Chinese)
- cobbzilla 3mo ago
  > they could just use a regex to change Claude to Kimi in their distillation pipeline! Jean-Kimi Van Damme would like to have a word with you.
  - 3mo ago
Grimblewald 3mo ago
and claude will call itself chatgpt etc. nothing new, all ai labs are immoral and not bound by any reasonable oversight or ethical constraints. All outlaws in their own rights on that front. Absolutely none of them have true rights on the matter of being distilled from given historic and continued behaviour. I'm not sure why this is a talking point at all? We know AI companies steal, the least interesting behaviour among this is them stealing from one another. For me, a far more interesting and important point of conversation on this matter is anthropic buying rare or evwn unique books, processing them for training data, and then destroying the books for others cannot use it as well. Permanemt destruction of priceless primary source materials is so many leagues beyond copying a copy that I cannot fathom it even registering as a discussion point.
- squidbeak 3mo ago
  > For me, a far more interesting and important point of conversation on this matter is anthropic buying rare or evwn unique books, processing them for training data, and then destroying the books for others cannot use it as well. That's an incredible allegation, and appalling if true. But is it true?
  - pxoe 3mo ago
    It's not an allegation https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop... (if you're talking about the "rare or unique" part, yeah that might be bs) But in my opinion, treating mass produced books like they're this sacred untouchable object is ridiculous. They're not "source" material, they're just a copy as well, and they're not "priceless" by any means. They're very reasonably priced, perhaps even so cheaply priced that books can be bought in bulk in these amounts. Buying used books and doing whatever you want with them is just legal. Used books, that would probably be just laying in some warehouse, or recycled anyway. If there's anything to have gripes with, it's the copyright system that makes it easier to take this legal route.
    - Grimblewald 3mo ago
StrauXX 3mo ago
Kimi calling itself claude means nothing. During pre-training, when the model learns to "simulate" the internet text, it will naturally be fed with a bunch of data about Claude and ChatGPT. With the amount of LLM outputs on the internet today, it is not surprising at all that a model would naturally call itself Claude or ChatGPT. You can mitigate that in post-training (or actually in pre-training as well) by training on many examples of what the model should call itself. That being said, getting probably hundreds pf thousands of ChatGPT and Claude examples totally "pirged" out of the weights is going to be difficult and really more hassle than its worth.
- tristanj 3mo ago
  Sure, but then Qwen should leak that too, and it doesn't. K3 calls itself Claude 7 out of 48 times, Qwen does it 0 out of 48, and the only other model to identify itself as Claude is DeepSeek. and DeepSeek is alleged to also distill from Claude data anyway. So this isn't something every model absorbed from the same web text. And you skipped over the strongest datapoint that K3 is distilled: K3 reproduces Claude's public model identifier under prefill (i.e. "claude-opus-4-5-20251101"). This data does not appear in Claude chat logs, only in API logs. K3 only does this for Claude models and not for any other lab. The real Claude models don't produce their own current public identifier, they only know their previous identifier (i.e. Sonnet 4.5 calls itself "Claude 3.5 Sonnet"). This is highly suggestive of the type of data that K3 was trained on. K3 was very likely trained on Claude metadata traces (API logs, tagged synthetic data). Not web chat logs, those wouldn't include this identifier. And this data wasn't filtered correctly, which is why K3 incorrectly identifies itself as Claude 15% of the time. You can also look at the last link and it's pretty damning: Kimi K3's output has an uncanny similarity to Fable/Opus output. https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full
  - mastazi 3mo ago
    > Qwen should leak that too, and it doesn't. FWIW I had Qwen identifying itself as "a language model made by Google" in one conversation, although I could not reproduce this reliably.
hnfong 3mo ago
Claude Sonnet 4.8 reproducibly identifies itself as DeepSeek when asked in Chinese: https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101 https://x.com/stevibe/status/2026227392076018101 I mean, people can point fingers however they want, and the fact is nobody actually "owns" the data they feed to their LLMs...
ComplexSystems 3mo ago
Surprising they didn't clean that from the data before training. It's easy to identify, a simple search->replace gets most of it, and a cheap LLM can identify the edge cases (e.g. avoiding "Claude Shannon" -> "Kimi Shannon" or something).
mldqj 3mo ago
> API distillation doesn't have to explain all of K3's capabilities for it to have happened. Kimi K3 reproducibly identifies itself as Claude This means nothing. It's not how LLMs work...

spaceman_2020 3mo ago

The entire debate about distilled vs not distilled is just academic. As an end user, I don’t give a crap how the model was trained as long as it does the job affordably enough I see all of AI as theft anyway so it makes no ontological difference if the theft was from a human or from another AI

lerchmo 3mo ago

If your business leaks to your customers… if you can ask your product for its inner secret sauce and it readily gives away the goose. That is not a moat.

RazorBucksICO 3mo ago

So if you were to imagine the second largest economy in the world, governed by a monolithic politburo, with a long history of barely concealed programs of corporate and academic espionage, what do you think their approach would be to American technology worth trillions? Now take it a step further, this hypothetical government sees itself as the civilization representation of an ethnic group, and regularly attempts to monitor and police that group regardless of where they are in the world. Also, that ethnic group, separated from the motherland by one generation or less, makes up the majority of research labor in American labs. Don’t you think there’s maybe a teeny, tiny chance that their approach is a little more sophisticated than just buying retail subscriptions? Maybe the trade secrets are being exfiltrated directly from the American labs?

reticulates 3mo ago
The ego of America to think it is the only place where innovation can happen is pretty funny. Maybe America’s hubris and hostility towards talented foreigners is driving talent towards other countries? China doesn’t need to embed bad actors and spies in Anthropic and OpenAI, the U.S. is sabotaging itself just fine. America was at the forefront of technology because it attracted the best talent from all over the world. The talent is now staying at home, and America is discovering that America is nothing without immigration. OpenAI and Anthropic are filled with Chinese employees because some of the most talented engineers are Chinese, not because they are spies. Unfortunately, that’s the last generation of Chinese talent that America will get, the latest generation are staying in China. Americans should be ashamed of what they have fumbled, not conspiratorial about what China is doing.
- RazorBucksICO 3mo ago
  If you think the number of US AI lab employees feeding information back to the homeland is zero, you’re terribly naive. There is the kind of money on the table people will absolutely lie, steal, and kill for. There is also not strong evidence that immigration is the source of progress. We issued many more patents in the 19th century than now which was well before Hart-Cellar. The statement that immigration is even declining is not also supported by evidence.