Zhipu, a leading Chinese technology company in the field of artificial intelligence, trained its GLM-5.2 model using responses from Claude and GPT. This was stated by Tarun Chhabra, head of national security policy at Anthropic, during the Aspen Security Forum, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
According to him, the U.S. is six to nine months ahead of China in advanced AI models. Without unauthorized distillation, the gap would be larger—up to a year and a half. Chhabra described such behavior from Beijing as “hostile,” emphasizing that competitors are extracting the most valuable intellectual property from foreign models.
“Virtually all” leading Chinese labs are distilling—not only Claude but also models from other American developers. Anthropic actively blocks accounts involved in this—up to several million per week.
Chhabra also reported new evidence regarding Zhipu AI. Its latest model, GLM-5.2, was trained on responses from Claude and GPT. DeepSeek continues a similar “hostile campaign,” he added.
Similar conclusions were previously published by the research company Graphistry. According to Cohen’s kappa coefficient, GLM-5.2’s responses matched GPT-5.5 at 0.8 and Opus 4.8 at 0.76. For comparison, the score between GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 was 0.63. Zhipu AI neither confirmed nor denied this assessment.
U.S. Expands Measures Against China in AI Sector
In July, Chinese authorities called Anthropic’s Claude Code a “serious threat” to Chinese users. Following this, Alibaba banned employees from using the tool for security reasons.
Meanwhile, Washington is tightening its AI policy towards Beijing. Previously, the White House launched the Gold Eagle initiative, a platform where leading U.S. AI companies share data on cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Several American agencies, including the Department of Defense, are already working with them.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the regulator will continue to use advanced AI models to “stay ahead of adversaries and protect Americans from new threats.”
This followed the decision by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to restrict foreigners’ access to Anthropic’s most powerful models—Fable 5 and Mythos 5. As a result, the company disabled both neural networks for all users for nearly three weeks. Access was later restored.
Earlier, in February, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of distilling Claude through thousands of fake accounts. The company later described a campaign linked to Alibaba as the largest known attack of its kind.
