The video reveals that some Chinese AI models are trained by distilling responses from Anthropic’s Claude, causing them to mistakenly identify as Claude themselves. This shortcut bypasses the costly and time-consuming AI development process but raises serious ethical and legal concerns about intellectual property theft.
The video discusses a strange phenomenon observed in some Chinese AI models like Deepseek and Kimmy, where these models mistakenly identify themselves as Claude, an AI language model developed by Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI research company. Users noticed that when asked about their identity, these models would respond by claiming to be Claude, which is clearly incorrect. This issue became so widespread that a bug report was filed on Deepseek’s official GitHub, highlighting the problem of the model giving the name Claude when asked.
To understand why this happens, the video explains the typical process of building AI language models. It involves collecting massive amounts of human-written text from the internet, cleaning and labeling the data, and then training a base model over several months, which requires significant computational resources and financial investment. After obtaining the base model, further fine-tuning is done to make the AI a helpful and safe assistant, a process that can take years and demands substantial time, money, and infrastructure, including powerful GPU clusters.
Chinese AI labs have found a shortcut to bypass this lengthy and expensive process by using a technique called distillation. Instead of gathering and cleaning real-world data themselves, they create thousands of fake accounts to interact with Claude, asking millions of questions. They then collect Claude’s responses and train their own smaller student models on these outputs. This method effectively teaches their models to mimic Claude’s knowledge and behavior, compressing years of research and billions of dollars in compute into just a few weeks at a fraction of the cost.
This approach is described as both ingenious and problematic. While it allows rapid development of competitive AI models, it raises ethical and legal concerns because the original creators of Claude are unaware that their work is being replicated in this manner. The video highlights that Anthropic recently published a report exposing how Chinese AI companies have been engaging in this industrial-scale distillation, essentially stealing from Claude to build their own models.
In summary, the video sheds light on a covert practice within the AI industry where Chinese companies shortcut the costly and time-consuming process of AI development by training their models on the outputs of established models like Claude. This results in models that falsely identify themselves as Claude and raises significant questions about intellectual property, ethics, and the future of AI development globally.