# OpenAI’s Astra Model Becomes Top Distillation Target for China’s AI Labs — retained record

> Retained news record from news:the-information.

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source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:the-information)  published 2026-10-29 01:00 ingested 2026-10-29 03:00

[original source ↗](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-astra-model-becomes-top-distillation-target-chinas-ai-labs)

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OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, the most powerful model the company has released, has met with strong demand since its release in early September. One growing customer base: Chinese AI labs that look to extract Astra’s capabilities. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, two of China’s leading AI developers, relied heavily on outputs from Astra when training their own latest models, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The practice, known in the industry as distillation, continues to be one of the biggest contributors to the progress made by Chinese open-weight models despite repeated criticism of such efforts by OpenAI and rival Anthropic.
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document fetched 2026-10-29 03:00 · canonical https://theinformation.com/articles/openais-astra-model-becomes-top-distillation-target-chinas-ai-labs