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

Chinese AI labs are now mainly tapping OpenAI's most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, instead of Anthropic's Claude. According to The Information, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI leaned heavily on Astra's outputs to train their latest models. People familiar with the matter say this includes Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017.

This kind of distillation only works if the labs get the models to reveal their hidden reasoning steps. OpenAI and Anthropic both ban that. Moonshot declined to comment, and DeepSeek didn't respond to a request for comment. Claude used to be the go-to target, but Anthropic has tightened its defenses. The company says 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 that it says involved people linked to Moonshot. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company takes the problem very seriously, but until now attackers adjusted their tactics every time it rolled out a new defense.

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