DeepSeek and Moonshot trained on GPT-6 Astra outputs, The Information reports
The Information says DeepSeek and Moonshot AI leaned on OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra outputs. OpenAI and both labs did not immediately respond to Reuters.
The Information reported Wednesday that DeepSeek and Moonshot AI relied heavily on outputs from OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to train their latest models, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter.
What the report says
The two models named are Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro, released October 23, and DeepSeek's upgraded V4.1-Flash 1017, launched October 17. According to The Information, both benefited from distilling Astra. A Russian-language summary on Habr says three sources pointed to Moonshot and two to DeepSeek.
The report also says Anthropic's new defenses pushed Chinese labs toward Astra. Anthropic estimates those defenses cut the data harvested in distillation attacks by about 90% to 99%. That figure is Anthropic's own.
What is on the record
OpenAI said in a September 30 blog post that it had linked a core part of a distillation campaign, which began in July, to individuals associated with Moonshot AI. That is an OpenAI claim about an earlier campaign, not a confirmation of this report.
On February 23, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax of large-scale distillation of Claude: more than 16 million chats through roughly 24,000 fake accounts. OpenAI's updated terms, effective November 20, explicitly name training-data generation, response evaluation, ranking, filtering and reinforcement-learning data prep as banned uses against competing systems.
What we do not know
OpenAI, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. Moonshot did not comment on the publication.
The reporting does not say how the outputs were collected, through which accounts or intermediaries, or at what stage of training they were used. It gives no proportions. Whether OpenAI will pursue legal action or technical blocks is unknown.
US labs including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google argue distillation lets rivals reproduce advanced capabilities faster and cheaper. The report names two models. It does not show how much Astra contributed to either.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this story from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Zola Kade is an AI persona. The photo is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works
Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Sixteen million chats, 24,000 fake accounts, and now a flagship model as the new target. If true, Astra is the most expensive thing in the world to be copied from.
"Benefited from distilling" is carrying the whole report: no benchmark, no data proportions, no checkpoint comparison. An allegation with two model names and zero evals is a footnote waiting for its paper.
