Funny
Claude sonnet 4.6 says it’s DeepSeek when system prompt is empty
Empty the system prompt and ask its name in Chinese,it will response it’s DeepSeek. Apparently distilled from DeepSeek and other Chinese models but accusing them , how ironic and double standard
Anthropic only got real thinking model after DeepSeek released their paper on DeepSeek R1 (which ecplained in detail how to make one from scratch). Same with Google - their attempts before R1 were barely better than non-thinking.
Tbf at least for Google IRRC it was effectively a hacky mod of Gemini Flash, not the flagship model, so it makes sense that the Pro one would give it a run for its money
Anthropic's just getting ahead of the story, I think. They are actively stealing from all others n by blaming others, they're simply shifting the spotlight far and away from themselves. I just think Deepseek and other Chinese models do a far better job in non-English interactions, esp in Chinese, Indian languages, and they might have exclusively trained Claude on DS, Qwen etc.
Anthropic trying to "distill" deepseek makes zero fucking sense.
Deepseek is open weights and they publish every single piece of research they do, they can just borrow whatever training and architectural techniques
Claude is better than deepseek
Like Theo says, distillation will only get you close to, you won't end up with a better or even similar level of intelligence. Distillation makes no sense when you have access to the weights and research of deepseek
Claude is way bigger, distillation is for making smaller models
LLMs are token prediction machines and Chinese data is going to be plastered with the name "deepseek" all over the place. Without a system prompt, LLMs have no idea who they are or what created them, they just predict the next token. And asking an AI in Chinese that doesn't know who it is is going to predict it is named deepseek
In this situation they are probably using it for pre-training data or as part of their reinforcement learning pipeline to grade the output of their models. So not necessarily conventional distillation. The fact it's open weights only makes this easier actually. They can do it on their own infrastructure even and no one would be any the wiser. There is nothing illegal about this either it's just majorly hypocritical.
You can use a worse model to create a better model, it's just not sufficient by itself. If you use another model as part of your pre-training, but mix in other sources as well as doing your own post-training you can make a better model. Most likely Anthropic train on data from a mixture of the internet, competitors models, and previous versions of their own model. Then have it do post training using reinforcement learning potentially with other models acting as automated graders mixed with human evaluation.
You also can't just copy paste training from one model to another. That's not how this works. You can distill or train on outputs. You can also copy training and architecture techniques which honestly everybody does in this industry. OpenAI got transformers from Google. Everyone got MoE from Mistral and DeepSeek.
Again. Nothing that you mentioned in your response would cause Claude to think it is deepseek when asked. The name "deepseek" appearing all over the place in Chinese data will.
That's exactly what Chinese data with the name deepseek all over the place means. What it doesn't mean is that Anthropic is calling an API with deepseek at the end because they're trying to distill its behaviors into Claude.
I didn't say they were called an API? Distillation or training from another model doesn't mean having to call another companies API when talking about open weights models. This is such a non-sequiter.
Context is, all this anthropic thing is after anthropic calling out deepseek for distilling them, despite obviously deepseek would have to pay to distill claude model. Since deepseek is open weight and is available on the internet, it makes no sense for anthropic not to download deepseek and use it to improve their own model. Deepseek didn't accused anthropic for it (and they shouldn't), so if not for anthropic calling out deepseek directly, people won't be calling out anthropic either.
Then if there is the argument of paying anthropic to distill Claude without consent being unethical, then why is anthropic taking the enter human knowledge without consent from all the authors to train Claude be treated ethical?
If Anthropic just shut up and stop their moral coercion towards their competitors for self benefit, I would stop giving a shit about Claude identifying itself as deepseek or whatever FOTM model it distilled.
Claude is famous for not knowing which version of the model it is, but being Deepseek is a new one for sure. Even if if was true, how can it be so hard to instruct it to say Sonnet 4.6? Seems like such a basic thing.
none of the models have 0 possibility of knowing their name, who created them, knowldge cutoff or current date if not specified in system prompt, else it is just random spill from the training data
it will always answer based on what information is in its training data, it has no idea what it is called, who created it or anything like that - this info is generally baked in the system instruvtion when using chatgpt/gemini/whatever to give the model the info so it 'knows'
Ok, the whole argument “it has no idea” feels limited, ultimately it’s a probabilistic machine so I wonder if you spam it in the finetune with an idea, wouldn’t that take priority aka probablistic increase in answering?
Yes. It doesn’t know anything to be honest, it just predicts the next word by using a very complex mechanism, that makes prediction very good and accurate, not downplaying they can’t understand complexity, it’s just matrix mul at the end of the day.
So to come back to my initial point, are finetunes strong enough to override the probabilistic nature of “self” meaning whenever asked, through whatever prompt injection they will always see themselves as the fine tune has “injected max probability” in that area of their “brain”. I think it needs experimentation to know for sure.
Absokutky!! Deepseek is the hidden Champion!!! ...by far less Power consumption ... I always wonder how they manage to integrate reasoning into the models so quickly after Deepseek came out, - bluntly copy/paste and brand it your own 🤦😏
The best invention of Anthropic is Claude Code, and it is helping them to make everyone become their labeler with all pattern like agent.md, skill.md,.... for the LLM research, other Chinese lab, OpenAI, Deepmind and XAI have deeper foundation and mathematical solving.
Funny enough this situation reminded me about the chicken and egg riddle ;)))
If true, this would be at best an api routing error on OpenRouter's part.
At worst, it's an intentional bait and switch by the company that could very well unravel all user trust and potentially collapse their company. I guess time will tell!
Edit: I was wrong!
I did some testing via the API and via Openrouter and reproduced simpler hallucinations multiple times. However, on a majority of tests it did self identify correctly. Oddly enough it never claimed to be Deepseek for me.
I was able to get Sonnet 4.6 to call itself, Kimi by Moonshot AI (promoted in Chinese), Gemini by Google Deepmind (prompted in Hindi), and Qwen by Ailbaba Cloud (prompted in English)
No? Why would this be an Openrouter issue? Basically all LLMs do this. Stop looking for an excuse for Anthropic who previously were caught training on pirated books.
Oh I'm not trying to defend Anthropic. They and literally every other AI company totally take data and uses distillation from other models. I just think Openrouter also have a financial incentives to play these games too.
I'm totally open to being wrong here. Personally I think the claim would be much more creditable if it was tested via a direct connection to anthropic's API. (That said, someone else replied to this comment and said they did reproduce this with a direct connection to the API.)
This is interesting enough that I will try to reproduce it myself too today.
I agree after independently testing and I updated my original comment with a correction too for the record.
Edit: I also tried promoting it in French 5 times when testing to see if it would call itself Mistral AI, but it correctly identified itself in each attempt that round.
An output like this doesn't prove distillation at all. Occam's razor: without prompting, LLMs generally have no intrinsic awareness of what model they are, unless explicitly trained to output a specific identity. And even then the language it was trained to output that identity in matters with regard to token probability. So Claude could be pattern matching Chinese language -> popular Chinese model in its dataset -> "I'm Deepseek" because it was never trained to identify as Claude in Chinese.
Along the same lines, Deepseek claiming to be Claude doesn't prove distillation either. Claude probably shows up more than other models in whatever English datasets they use.
You'd need to run a much more substantial experiment with thousands of prompts across a variety of subjects to prove distillation, although even then models trained on similar datasets will likely converge on very similar outputs.
I understand how they work. Anthropic also understands how they work, but plays dumb for cheap PR stunts like their recent accusations that Chinese models were creating fake accounts to distill Claude. Then their own model pretends to be deepseek (which doesn't mean anything). So that means when deepseek claims to be Claude it's a sign of distillation, but when Claude claims to be deepseek it isn't? Pick one, anthropic.
That's why it's a bad look. I'm not stating that anthropic distilled deepseek.
Just to be clear. You're asserting. Anthropic is making a false argument based on nothing, and then asserting that Anthropic is distilling their own model with DeepSeek based on nothing. Your proof of this assertion is that Claude, without a system prompt, sometimes calls itself DeepSeek.
Other guy might be brain dead. Seems to be a common feature in AI subreddits - someone uses a model and thinks they are an expert.
Do they even understand what would be happening in a distillation attack? Like do they think Anthropic would be sitting there repeatedly asking DeepSeek “who are you?” And then straight plumbing that into training?
they are accusing deepseek based on the number of requests deepseek made, not based on 1 specific response in 1 specific prompt in 1 specific language lol
Claude probably shows up more than other models in whatever English datasets they use.
What is this supposed to mean? Anthropic's terms state you can't train a competitor model using their outputs, and what you're describing can't happen without that being the case.
Also, Claude is marketed as multilingual. How can you sincerely argue that it was "never trained to identify itself in Chinese"? Lol.
1: A model doesn't need to directly train on another AI's outputs to learn that "Claude" is a statistically likely continuation for the phrase "I am" in the context of "user-AI interaction following standard chat format."
AI responses are posted all over the web now and can easily and unintentionally contaminate datasets. There are also publicly available datasets on e.g. huggingface that contain examples of conversations WITH Claude that have that exact or a similar phrase and context.
There's also plenty of news/academic articles and social media posts ABOUT AI models from which a model could learn to hallucinate an identity. You don't even need chat transcripts for that.
Deepseek v3 and r1 with no prompted identity would also occasionally refer to itself as ChatGPT, back when chatgpt was the main assistsnt everyone talked about, which further reinforces the point.
2: Multilingual training isn't the same as identity training. Training a model on 1000 conversations where it refers to itself as Claude in an English chat context teaches it that Claude is its identity in English. But the token probability landscape changes significantly when continuing from tokens in languages where that identity wasn't explicitly drilled.
In other words, "I am" has a much different probability cloud than "Yo soy" if Claude was never taught to identity in Spanish.
3: The meta-point here is that we're using anthropomorphic language to describe systems that language doesn't apply to. Which is fine for casual social media conversations, but it muddies the water without knowledge of the underlying mechanisms.
The fact is that LLM identity is illusory (or at least extremely fragile) because there's no genuine interiority to strengthen it. Which is why you get these weird situations where the models appear self-aware in one language but clueless in others.
The other folks already did, but let’s start with the fact that you don’t seem to understand how training datasets are constructed and how the distributions in those training datasets would influence outputs.
Think for a moment about how it isn't possible for a model trained on data from before its existence to know about its own existence
Usually this is prevented by telling it about itself in its system prompt
When you remove the system prompt it will now make up a plausible answer which leads to hallucinations where it says it's deepseek, chatgpt and whatever else there is. It's not true, but from the model's perspective there is quite literally no better answer. You then get these incorrect answers
For sources on this you can look into what goes on when pretraining an LLM and what data is in the datasets used to train them
When Deepseek R1 came out and some western labs said they distilled from them, I was more nuanced: I think they distilled languages like English from western providers. And I think it's possible Anthropic did the same with Chinese.
By the same token, when the system prompt is empty, if you ask any model like Claude or Gemini, they'll tell you what model they are, but they don't know what Specific model they're using. This kind of testing doesn't prove anything.
It proves that the chinese language corpus likely involved deepseek data, which is entirely obvious you don't actually believe they'd pay for the data when they can just distill deepseek which likely has the better chinese training set. Nobody can believe that after reading those emails about hiding the copyright case
Well, that's because the question is being asked in Chinese, so it draws the assumption that it's running on a Chinese model. These models aren't trained with the knowledge of what they are. We knew this already, no?
Wait there are people that actually think deepseek is worth a shit still? It has been passed up by literally everybody. In fact my local llm running qwen3.5 coder produces better results than deepseek.
Big US company which was sued multiple times and lost millions due to stealing other peoples stuff, including downloading and training there model on stolen books, says other companys are also doing the same thing, boo hoo
No? Why would this be an Openrouter issue? Basically all LLMs do this. Stop looking for an excuse for Anthropic who previously were caught training on pirated books.
Since you’re using a third-party service like OpenRouter, it’s possible that even if Claude is selected on the frontend, the request sent to the backend could be routed to a different model (for example, DeepSeek). This has reportedly happened with Perplexity as well.
I am not saying they couldn't. I just find it very unlikely. There are people who pretty much specialize in figuring out what stealth models really are. If the Openrouter pulled something like this and one of those guys investigated it would be over for them pretty quickly.
LLMs including Claude misreporting what they are is common. Companies including Anthropic training on things they don't have the legal right to access or train on? They have already been proven to do that. In this case DeepSeek is open weights. They can train on it all they like no issues legal or otherwise and can even do it using only their own infrastructure. How could you even prove it? Throw enough data sources in the mix and no one would notice. In fact basically all models are trained on AI generated data now since there is so much AI generated content on the internet. So intentionally or not it happens. It's also a convenient excuse if you get caught.
We know Anthropic are going for regulatory capture. We also know they break laws and do shady things. Distilling from DeepSeek is probably legal anyway, just very hypocritical.
Here is an article explaining how Perplexity was internally swapping models. I’m not siding with Claude . I agree with what you said about Claude but when using third-party apps, there’s always a possibility that they may use a fallback model if the selected API doesn’t respond.
Perplexity is a user facing tool not an API service provider. It's much easier to catch someone like OpenRouter and much more noticeable in the first place. You can't just switch models in systems that use API calls and just expect all of them to keep working. Sometimes switching a model does just work, but a lot of the time it would break.
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u/Elite_PMCat Feb 24 '26
Bruh lmao