Anthropic said in October 2026 that its anti-distillation defenses cut the reasoning tokens distillers extract from Claude by 10 to 100 times

Anthropic describes new defenses against illicit distillation of Claude, including preserved thinking, a two-stage classifier, and account bans, which cut extracted reasoning tokens 10-100x. It argues distillation threatens national security and urges all developers and platforms to act.