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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

If you are distilling from other models (according to Anthropic reports they are [1]), there are probably a bunch of things that you can just do away with.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

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That's one of the reasons why you should never trust a single word from Anthropic and OpenAI (Sam Altman also blamed them back in the day of R1, in a pretty convenient moment). If you know anything about Claude, DeepSeek, jailbreaking, and distillation, you know the claims are clearly bullshit and the models are nothing alike, and forensic attempts agree, in fact there just was another one [1] [2].

Meanwhile, DeepSeek makes their models and methodology open, so Anthropic can (and likely do) grab without giving back.

[1] https://gist.github.com/wsxiaoys/e0286dc6bb624ff5fdf49e7f4c5...

[2] https://gist.github.com/wsxiaoys/102e8654c14d5d27b7b77532026...

This raise a question: why do open source models sometimes identify themself as Anthropic's models. I recall seeing some plausible theories in the past but I can't recall.

Name training is shallow and should never be relied upon. Claude sometimes identifies itself as Qwen or DeepSeek when asked in Chinese. I've seen it identify itself as GPT-3 (that version in particular) and Reddit Anti-Evil Operations team (Sonnet 3.6).

Interestingly the latest report from Anthropic explained that they may be just routing requests to managed models to Anthropic.

I don't see how your links support the claim that the studied models did no distillation from US models.

Implanting a foreign CoT should drop the performance due to the reward-hacked CoT language mismatch, or in any case it will give replies different from the suspected teacher, which is precisely what happens here. However it's just a single datapoint, there were plenty of attempts to figure it out. Just about everything is different in those two model series, from writing patterns to CoT strategies. If you are familiar with modern guardrails and Claude's raw CoT (which is trivial to leak), you know it's entirely different from DeepSeek's, and any claim that they trained on the CoT is extraordinary and requires extraordinary evidence. They need to prove their claims, not vice versa.

For the contrast, you can see how actual CoT distillation looks like in practice in various versions of GLM: make a Google ToS-breaking request, and see how GLM 4.6 or 4.7 repeats Google's conditional prompt injections in full in their CoT (Gemini 2.5-3.0 only regurgitated small snippets, because they used something closer to a "chain of draft", but GLM reconstructed it from Gemini's CoT during distillation). GLM 5.3 repeats Anthropic's prompt injections and Claude constitution, word by word. That's how distillation looks like.

Ah, I see now that you were making a claim narrowly scoped to DeepSeek models specifically. Still, Anthropic has made specific claims about deliberate access to Claude CoT by DeepSeek (e.g. https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb...) that suggest that they find this information useful even if they do not train directly on it in the way that other labs appear to.

Those are rookie numbers for "distillation" and one of moonshot or minimax used to offer tooling via these shady routing services for their harness/chat platforms which they served to chinese users.

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