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

Chinese AI labs are now mainly using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra rather than Anthropic's Claude for distillation, with The Information reporting that DeepSeek and Moonshot AI leaned heavily on Astra's outputs to train models including Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017. Such distillation requires labs to get models to reveal hidden reasoning steps, which both OpenAI and Anthropic ban. Anthropic says its new defenses cut the data attackers can pull by 90 to 99 percent, and OpenAI in late September reported a coordinated distillation campaign it says involved people linked to Moonshot.