People are getting it wrong; Anthropic doesn't care about the distillation, they just want to counter the narrative about Chinese open-source models catching up with closed-source frontier models

Why would they care about distillation when they probably have done the same with OpenAI models and the Chinese labs are paying for the tokens? This is just their attempt to explain to investors and the US government that cheap Chinese models will never be as good as their models without distillation or stealing model weights from them. And they need to put more restrictions on China to prevent the technology transfer.