"we have information" says a US Government official who almost certainly has had Anthropic and/or OpenAI on the phone spinning him stories.

See also, don't trust anyone in Trump's government who says "we have information".

"they distilled us" is fast becoming standard US FUD.

The same as people telling me with a serious face that the Chinese models are distilled just because it says "I am Claude".

I am not the only one, look at this post on interconnects about Kimi K3 for example:[1]

     It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree. AI observers who followed the distillation panic and came away with the wrong conclusion that Chinese AI labs are only producing good models due to IP theft are in for an awakening – that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are.