Impostor Chinese Models Pretend They're Claude
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Raising suspicion about their training methods, Z.ai's GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 have used the name "Claude" in some conversations and, for GLM, at least, changed behaviors slightly when posing as Anthropic's model.
The Chinese open weight models may adopt Claude's persona if prompted to do so, or even without being told so, but a claimed identity isn't always reflected in behavior due to training differences. So if model copying did occur - as claimed by the US - Claude's influence appears limited.
In the case of GLM 5.2, adopting Claude's identity appeared to loosen its Chinese censorship. Kimi K3 could be convinced to use the name, although that produced little change in its censorship or measured persona, and its unprompted Claude identity claims disappeared after July 20.
MATS research fellows Benji Berczi and Kyuhee Kim undertook a study of whether the possible distillation of Anthropic's Claude model family may have affected the personas of GLM 5.2, Kimi K3, among other models.
Model distillation is a process by which a student model can be trained to imitate a teacher model.
It is a common machine learning technique, one that pretty much every major US AI company, apart from Amazon and Anthropic, defended last week in a public letter urging the US government not to harm open weight AI innovation.
"[P]olicymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation," the letter says. "Distillation, or the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation."
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