OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Collaborate to Share Intelligence Against China's AI Model Distillation

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are sharing information through the industry nonprofit organization Frontier Model Forum to jointly detect violations of their terms of service related to ‘adversarial distillation.’ This organization was jointly established by the three companies along with Microsoft in 2023. Distillation is a technique that uses the outputs of existing models to train new models, replicating the former’s capabilities at a lower cost. AI companies often use distillation to create smaller and more efficient versions of their models, but unauthorized third-party distillation is controversial in the industry. OpenAI confirmed its participation in this collaboration and cited a memo it previously submitted to the U.S. Congress, stating that deep learning attempts to ‘ride on the coattails of the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other leading U.S. labs.’ Google, Anthropic, and Frontier Model Forum declined to comment. U.S. government officials estimate that unauthorized distillation results in billions of dollars in profit losses for Silicon Valley labs each year. This collaboration draws on practices in the cybersecurity industry where companies share attack intelligence. The AI action plan released by the Trump administration last year also called for the establishment of dedicated information sharing and analysis centers. However, due to uncertainties regarding the boundaries of what can be shared under current antitrust laws, the scope of information sharing remains limited. The three companies have not provided public evidence indicating the extent to which Chinese model innovations rely on distillation, but they claim that the frequency of such behavior can be measured by the number of large-scale data requests.