Could this be in part because many of the recent Chinese models (which seem great, tbh) show signs of having been distilled from one or another Claude models?

Or is that a silly idea, because distillation is unlikely to be stopped by rate limits (i.e., if distillation is a worthwhile tactic, companies that want to distill from Anthropic models will gladly spend a lot more money to do it, use many, many accounts to generate syntheitc data, etc.)?