My site: https://natebjones.com
Full Story w/ Prompts: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/three-labs-just-stole-claudes-brain?r=1z4sm5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
___________________
What's really happening when three Chinese labs run 16 million automated conversations across 24,000 fake accounts to steal Claude's capabilities? The common story is Cold War espionage—but the reality is more interesting when you recognize this is a Napster problem, and the thousand-to-one economics of extraction apply to everyone on earth.

In this video, I share the inside scoop on why distillation changes how you should evaluate every AI tool you're using:

• Why $2 million in API costs can extract capabilities that cost $2 billion to develop
• How distilled models occupy narrower capability manifolds that break on agentic work
• What the "off-manifold probe" reveals that no benchmark captures
• Where the performance shadow between frontier and distilled models is widest

For anyone building real systems on AI, the provenance of a model is not just an ethical question—it's a capability question, and where the weights come from determines how the model breaks.

Subscribe for daily AI strategy and news.
For deeper playbooks and analysis: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/