DeepSeek, minimax and so on have razer thin margins but unlike openai and Anthropic they are actually making some profit. Doing this doesn't make any financial sense.

Maybe Anthropic is confusing Chinese AI providers with token resellers using the same alibaba infrastructure? Or maybe something like openrouter was switching between operators depending on price/demand/availability?

Also, how can Anthropic have such accurate information about state actors and cybercriminals? This is the same company that hacked itself and realised that first months later..

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gjm11 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My understanding of what Anthropic are saying about this is that the labs in question aren't forwarding things to Claude to make money nor even to look better to the customers whose queries they forward to Claude but to get access to conversations between real users and Claude, which they can then use to help train their own models.

(I do not guarantee that I'm understanding right, and still less do I guarantee that what Anthropic say is actually true.)

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KronisLV 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve seen the supposed Kimi thinking output yap about Anthropic’s guidelines and whatnot on many occasions - could also be the result of distillation, but also that straight up being Claude’s output.

To be honest I've also gotten Kimi to do an okay proof of concept for SQLi though mostly in a more defensive role, like "Let's see how big of a problem this is", while Claude complained about CVP on the same task.

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atleastoptimal 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic is profitable now

>https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/08/17/anthropic...

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throwa356262 4 hours ago | parent [-]

For the first time ever, and that for just a short while. And after significant price hikes that has had their biggeat customers looking for alternatives.

	▲	qlte 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also not GAAP profitable in that quarter

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echelon 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You do this to distill a model.

You can submit your users' questions async too, but if you do it sync, then you can also RLHF on the users' behavior after the output.

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qlte 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah, that makes way more sense than Anthropic's (probably deliberately misleading) insinuation that Moonshot has been burning millions of dollars in Claude API credits by swapping in a slightly better but infinitely more expensive model just to trick their users.

I get those A/B responses chatting in Gemini fairly often, and I really don't think I'd feel deceived if I later learned one of the choices was actually from a competitor's model.

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vopi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t think it was misleading, deliberately or otherwise. Did you read the report? I hate to call you out like that but I think you can only get that impression if you only read the above quotes. That’s not the insinuation I get at all. It’s specifically under the “illicit distillation” category. It’s never framed in anyway but as a form of distillation.

I think they are pretty fair and explicitly say “Distillation itself is a legitimate training method […] Distillation is commonly used because it reduces the resources needed to achieve more advanced capabilities”. And go on to say their definition that makes it illicit in these cases.

And, also, they almost certainly __were__ tricking users and sending their data overseas.

Do you see it any differently?

	▲	villish 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They mean distillation is legitimate when labs use one of their own stronger models to train a smaller one. They certainly aren’t advocating for PRC labs to distill Claude for open weight models.