The three giants of the artificial intelligence (AI) space — Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI — have reportedly joined hands to combat the attempts of model distillation by Chinese rivals. As per the report, the Silicon Valley firms have agreed to share information to ensure that their frontier AI models are not copied and brought to the market at a cheaper price point. Notably, in 2025, OpenAI first accused Chinese AI firm DeepSeek of distilling its model to build the DeepSeek-R1.
Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI Unite to Fight Model Distillation Attempts
According to a Bloomberg report, the three AI firms are now working together to crack down on attempts by Chinese AI developers that allegedly use model distillation techniques to copy Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI’s proprietary large language models (LLMs).
The AI companies are reportedly sharing information via the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that was founded by the three companies alongside Microsoft in 2023. The body was formed to promote safe and responsible development of frontier AI systems and knowledge sharing. The same forum is said to be used to detect adversarial distillation attempts.
In AI parlance, model distillation is a technique where a smaller, more efficient student model is trained to mimic the behaviour of a larger teacher model. In authorised scenarios, the method helps companies save costs on developing smaller models by using the frontier AI model as the reference point. It learns structured output and retrieval methods from the larger model, although it operates at a smaller scale.
The allegation from the three AI giants is that Chinese companies are using their AI services in a way that breaches their terms of use. They are essentially generating a large amount of outputs to use the data to train their models. Once the trained models become efficient enough, these are released with highly competitive pricing that undercut the models from the Silicon Valley developers, the report claimed.
The imitation models are costing US-based AI firms billions of dollars in annual profits, the report claimed, citing a person familiar with the findings. However, Gadgets 360 staff members were not able to independently verify these claims. Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have reportedly also called the distillation efforts a national security risk.