Anthropic says new safeguards cut distillation attacks 90-99%, bans tens of thousands of accounts

Distillation, training a cheaper model on a stronger model's outputs, is a persistent concern for frontier labs. Reasoning traces are especially valuable training data. Anthropic's safeguards target bulk extraction patterns and reduce how much usable reasoning output leaks per query.

Community reaction was loud. A r/singularity thread on the 90-99% claim drew 705 upvotes and 330 comments. On r/LocalLLaMA, 'Anthropic is doing free publicity for GLM again' (755 upvotes) joked that each disclosure implicitly highlights Chinese labs such as Zhipu's GLM, which is now on Bedrock as GLM 5.3. Ethan Mollick separately remarked that using Gemini 4 shows how many models 'must be distilling Claude/GPT'.

The move protects margins as Anthropic reportedly posts an 85% gross margin. Cheap distilled competitors are the main threat to its pricing.

Caveats: the effectiveness figures are self-reported, and determined actors may shift to subtler extraction. Legitimate heavy users could face false-positive bans. Watch for how bans affect API developers.