The Silent Heist: How Distillation Attacks Are Reshaping the Global AI Landscape
Introduction to the AI Frontier The AI race has largely boiled down to a high-stakes contest between the US and China. On one side, established US companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and X have continuously pushed the boundaries of frontier AI models. Anthropic, the research lab behind Claude, is best known for its focus on AI safety and its unique ‘constitutional’ approach to alignment. Meanwhile, several Chinese tech firms have been fast-tracking models to compete with the best systems coming out of the US. This competition reached a turning point when Anthropic revealed it had been targeted by industrial-scale ‘distillation attacks’ from three major Chinese AI labs. ...