TL;DRByteDance founder Zhang Yiming reportedly banned researchers from distilling rival AI models in 2023, years before US sanction threats made abstention politically useful. ByteDance is the one major Chinese lab Anthropic has not accused of distillation, and its models have been surpassed by several smaller Chinese rivals that were named.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming reportedly forbade the company’s AI researchers from distilling rival models, according to The Information, a policy that dates to 2023. The timing matters because it predates the period when avoiding US retaliation became a commercial priority, as the Pekingnology newsletter noted.
Distillation involves feeding queries to a powerful model, collecting the outputs, and using them to train a cheaper system that approximates the original. It has become the central flashpoint in the US-China AI dispute.
The company that was not named
ByteDance is conspicuously absent from Anthropic’s accusations. The US lab alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax used roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges with Claude in a coordinated extraction campaign.
