Claude is the distillation target of choice because agentic RL seed data is scarce

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-09-11

Following up on the distillation question, @teortaxesTex argues that while OpenAI models do get distilled, the company doesn't care much about China. The real driver is the difficulty of acquiring certain training signals: Claude is a known-good agent, and in the era of agents it's hard to get seed datasets for agentic RL otherwise. He adds that OpenAI's Astra could return it to the prime target list.

Related event: Why Chinese labs mostly distill from Anthropic, not OpenAI(3 posts)→

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