Anthropic warns that the gap between US and Chinese large models will only remain for a few months, calling for legislation to ban "distillation attacks"

According to Beating Monitoring, Anthropic has released a policy document on US-China AI competition, for the first time categorizing the distillation of Chinese large models as a systemic act of industrial espionage, urging the US Congress to legislate to make it illegal, and calling for a complete closure of compute power loopholes such as overseas data centers.

Anthropic assesses that, although the US currently maintains an overall advantage of 12 to 24 months, China’s top models are only a few months behind in intelligence. The document points out that Chinese laboratories can keep up with the forefront mainly due to two major loopholes. One is obtaining restricted US chips, with Anthropic explicitly naming Alibaba and ByteDance for using Southeast Asian data centers to bypass bans, and mentioning DeepSeek’s use of prohibited chips to train the latest models. The second is distilling US cutting-edge models through large numbers of fake accounts, to steal innovation achievements at extremely low cost.

Therefore, Anthropic calls for clear legislation to define distillation attacks as illegal, requests increased law enforcement budgets for chip smuggling, and proposes establishing threat intelligence sharing mechanisms between US laboratories and the government. To emphasize the practical destructive power of technological gaps, the document reveals that its Mythos Preview model released in April helped Firefox fix more security vulnerabilities in a single month than the total for the entire previous year. This capability has been described by Chinese cybersecurity analysts as a sudden automatic Gatling gun being aimed at opponents.

While there is still controversy over the ethical boundaries of distilling large models in the industry, Anthropic directly elevates it to a matter of national security, attempting to forcibly cut off low-cost competitive shortcuts through legal means.