On March 3, 2026, in response to the accusation from the U.S.-based AI company Anthropic, which claimed that a Chinese company had "distilled" its AI model, Li Kaifu, the CEO of 01.AI, publicly stated that model distillation is a standard technical approach within the industry and does not breach any regulations. He emphasized that Anthropic's reaction was an overblown one. Li Kaifu also highlighted that Anthropic had previously faced a lawsuit from American writers for pirating millions of books and was mandated to pay $1.5 billion in compensation, a sum that included $3,000 in royalties owed to him personally. Earlier, Elon Musk had also criticized Anthropic for unlawfully using developers' code to train its models, labeling the company's actions as hypocritical.
