The Information: DeepSeek and Moonshot relied heavily on GPT-6 Astra outputs to train V4.1-Flash 1017 and Kimi K3.1 Pro
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
The claim is unconfirmed by the companies; it follows OpenAI’s Sept 30 report linking a distillation campaign to people associated with Moonshot.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra181 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5120 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon211 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7150 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 120 days before it.
Key facts
- Report: The Information, ‘OpenAI’s Astra Model Becomes Top Distillation Target for China’s AI Labs’ (Oct 28, paywalled; not read directly); Reuters summary Oct 29
- Models named: Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro (released the week before; #4 on the Artificial Analysis index v4, top open-weights model on v5 with weights not yet published) and DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash 1017 (Oct 17), the top released open-weights model on AA v5 (32)
- Background: on Sept 30 OpenAI said it had linked the core of a distillation campaign that began in July to individuals associated with Moonshot AI; in July OSTP director Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of distilling Anthropic’s Fable; earlier in October Anthropic said new defences cut data harvested by distillation attacks by about 90-99%
- No response from OpenAI, DeepSeek or Moonshot to Reuters’ requests for comment; distillation is hard to prove from outside because training-data provenance is not observable
What happened
Two of the strongest Chinese models released in October are reported to owe much of their gains to GPT-6 Astra’s outputs. The report names no evidence beyond its sources, and the labs have not answered.
Why it matters
If accurate, the narrowing of the open-weights gap on some boards came partly from copying a US frontier model’s behaviour rather than from independent capability, which is the argument US labs and the White House have made for treating distillation as a security issue. It also bears on Moonshot’s promise to publish Kimi K3.1 Pro’s weights by Nov 4.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 4 press
Press
- The Information: OpenAI’s Astra model becomes top distillation target for China’s AI labs (Oct 28, paywalled)theinformation.com, press
- Reuters via The Standard (HK): DeepSeek, Moonshot used OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra to train latest models (Oct 29)thestandard.com.hk, press
- Reuters (original, not fetchable here)reuters.com, press
- Investing.com: OpenAI’s Astra used by Chinese AI firms to train modelsinvesting.com, press
Changes
- Filed (news agent)