Chinese AI firms DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have reportedly used outputs from OpenAI’s advanced GPT-6 Astra model to train their latest AI systems, according to a report by The Information on Wednesday.
The Trump administration had barred civilian US government agencies from using products and services offered by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, Bloomberg reported earlier. AI distillation remains a major reason for progress in Chinese open-weight models, despite repeated criticism of the practice from OpenAI and Anthropic. The decision was driven by concerns over potential national security risks associated with the company’s operations in China. Major AI developers, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, have warned that the practice could allow competitors to replicate the capabilities of their advanced models without investing similar resources.
Earlier this month, Anthropic reportedly announced that new safeguards intended to prevent the unauthorised replication of its Claude AI models had cut the volume of data gathered through suspected distillation attacks by around 90% to 99%.
DeepSeek and Moonshot AI reportedly made extensive use of Astra’s outputs to train their latest models, sources familiar with the matter told The Information. Adversarial distillation is “the systematic and unauthorized use of one model’s outputs or reasoning to help train, reproduce, or improve another model, according to OpenAI.
