MiniMax M2.5 is trained by Claude Opus 4.6?

12 pointsOrellius12d ago11 comments

I was chatting with MiniMax M2.5 in OpenRouter and suddenly he mysteriously repeated on "I'm Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic - not a "language" ", heh wut?

11 comments

KomoD8d ago

Well yeah, that is what Anthropic is claiming so I'm not surprised.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/technology/anthropic-chin...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

> We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models. These labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions.

muzani12d ago

They all are trained by each other. Claude says it's DeepSeek if you ask it in Mandarin.

SilverElfin12d ago

Most people seem to think that phenomenon is not the same thing. People have shown by experimenting with different prompts that even in Mandarin, Claude correctly says it’s Claude when it is doing something for you. But if you ask it about its identity, it sometimes says DeepSeek. The current theory is it just has run into Chinese content that has chat logs that often have a DeepSeek model answering that it is DeepSeek. But the inconsistency in different prompts suggests this is something different from distillation.

throwaw1212d ago

Isn't it great news for us?

You get an open model which is a 95% of Opus 4.6 quality and 80% cheaper in most inference providers and also can run on your own hardware

Also they did the hard parts of:

* crawling the content

* running the fine tuning (or training)

Better than 1 or 2 companies taking control of the whole AI economy

pogue12d ago

Is theft of theft theft?

1 more reply

SilverElfin12d ago

This has been a common issue with the Chinese open weight models. It appears most or all have been trained via distillation on OpenAI and Anthropic models.

orbital-decay12d ago

They most likely weren't, despite very dubious claims of Amodei and Altman and a certain twitter influencer running a pretty naive writing benchmark ("slop test") that is wrong in a very obvious manner. The only unambiguous cases of distillation were Gemini 2.0 experimentals being trained on Claude outputs, and GLM-4.7 being trained on Gemini 3.0 Pro. The rest are pretty different from each other.

Balinares12d ago

What makes these cases unambiguous?

1 more reply

orbital-decay12d ago

If it was, that line is not an indicator. Distillation is done on useful prompts, not on "Who are you?" - "I'm this model of that company".

Name training is always shallow, Claude itself would claim it's GPT-3, GPT-4, or Reddit (heh) when confused. It's just dataset contamination, because the web is full of slop. Never trust self-reported names.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

11 comments

KomoD8d ago

Well yeah, that is what Anthropic is claiming so I'm not surprised.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/technology/anthropic-chin...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

muzani12d ago

They all are trained by each other. Claude says it's DeepSeek if you ask it in Mandarin.

SilverElfin12d ago

throwaw1212d ago

Isn't it great news for us?

You get an open model which is a 95% of Opus 4.6 quality and 80% cheaper in most inference providers and also can run on your own hardware

Also they did the hard parts of:

* crawling the content

* running the fine tuning (or training)

Better than 1 or 2 companies taking control of the whole AI economy

pogue12d ago

Is theft of theft theft?

1 more reply

SilverElfin12d ago

This has been a common issue with the Chinese open weight models. It appears most or all have been trained via distillation on OpenAI and Anthropic models.

orbital-decay12d ago

Balinares12d ago

What makes these cases unambiguous?

1 more reply

orbital-decay12d ago

If it was, that line is not an indicator. Distillation is done on useful prompts, not on "Who are you?" - "I'm this model of that company".

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse