Did Claude Opus 4.8 distill Alibaba's Qwen? Here's what the evidence says
Summary
The article investigates claims that Claude Opus 4.8 identified itself as Alibaba's Qwen, analyzing evidence and concluding the behavior is likely due to an identity bug or data-related issues rather than true distillation. It discusses possible causes (training-data contamination, prompt fragility, proxy routing) and emphasizes that provenance claims are hard to prove and require forensics.