By Tim Fernholz
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 18:03:00
OpenAI and Anthropic have recently been on the warpath against third-party efforts to train new AI models by having their chatbots and APIs publicly available, a process known as “distillation.”
This conversation focused on Chinese companies that are using distillation to develop open-weight models that are nearly as capable as U.S. offerings but available at a much lower cost. However, engineers largely assume that American laboratories are mutually applying these techniques to avoid falling behind the competition.
Now we know that this is true in at least one case: On Thursday, Elon Musk was asked in a California federal court whether xAI had used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he claimed this was a common practice among AI companies. When asked if that meant “yes,” he replied, “Partly.”
Musk is in the process of suing OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, saying they violated OpenAI’s original nonprofit mission by moving the company to…
