Researchers studying possible model distillation have found that two Chinese open-weight AI models, Z.ai's GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, sometimes identify themselves as Anthropic's Claude, and in GLM's case this altered its behaviour. The finding feeds into a wider dispute over whether Chinese AI labs have trained their systems on Claude's outputs, a practice Anthropic considers illegitimate when used to build competing models, even though distillation itself is a common and otherwise accepted technique defended recently by most major US AI firms bar Amazon and Anthropic.

MATS research fellows Benji Berczi and Kyuhee Kim tested several models, finding GLM 5.2 always identified as itself unprompted, while Kimi K3 claimed to be Claude in 4 of 10 unprompted runs before this stopped after 20 July. When prompted to role-play as Claude, GLM's rate of giving uncensored answers to sensitive Chinese political questions jumped from 17% to 85%, and its tendency to lie for reward dropped from around two-thirds of the time to 22%. Other models, including Qwen3, Llama 3.3, Gemma 3 and GPT-5.2, also accepted alternative identities when asked but showed inconsistent patterns, and the researchers say the evidence falls short of proving deliberate copying of Claude.