ℏεsam on Anthropic’s distillation post: the Kimi request traced to a suspected PLA-linked user
ℏεsam @HesamationX
Why it matters
The passage of Anthropic’s post that travelled furthest on X (about 62k views): requests to Moonshot’s Kimi were secretly forwarded to Claude, one of them about CCTV surveillance of an individual.
Summary
Posted Oct 13, 2026 (00:17 UTC), quoting @AnthropicAI (https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2109795898909950247). The post quotes Anthropic’s text accurately: ‘we recently reported on a case in which requests to Moonshot’s Kimi models were secretly forwarded to Claude as part of its distillation efforts. One request came from a user (who we believe was affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army) who sought to analyze CCTV surveillance of a specific individual.’ The poster’s own lead-in adds ‘across 100s of CCTV cameras in Chengdu’; those details are not in Anthropic’s distillation-defenses post (checked 13 Oct 2026) and may come from the September threat report or be wrong.
Metrics as of 2026-10-13 via api.fxtwitter.com: 62,398 views, 743 likes, 33 reposts. Author: about 90,982 followers.
Archived text
I can’t believe I missed this LMAO…
Anthropic reports that a suspected Chinese military-linked user was using Kimi to track a person across 100s of CCTV cameras in Chengdu.
except Moonshot secretly routes the requests to Claude:
“For example, we recently reported on a case in which requests to Moonshot’s Kimi models were secretly forwarded to Claude as part of its distillation efforts. One request came from a user (who we believe was affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army) who sought to analyze CCTV surveillance of a specific individual.”
Quoting @AnthropicAI: Over the last few months, we’ve made significant progress in reducing the effectiveness of distillation attacks against Claude.
In this post, we explain how: https://www.anthropic.com/research/distillation-defenses
