OpenAI's Astra Model Becomes Top Distillation Target for China's AI Labs

[The Information] OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, the most powerful model the company has released, has drawn strong demand since its early-September launch, and one growing customer base is Chinese AI labs seeking to extract its capabilities, according to The Information. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, two of China's leading AI developers, relied heavily on outputs from Astra when training their latest models, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The practice, known in the industry as distillation, remains one of the biggest contributors to progress by Chinese open-weight models, even as OpenAI and rival Anthropic have repeatedly criticized such efforts.