---
id: "t-2026-03-21-distillation-licences-and-trust-in-the-ai-model"
type: "thought"
title: "Distillation, licences and trust in the AI model ecosystem"
date: "2026-03-21"
week: "2026-W12"
url: "https://nosov.ai/writing/distillation-licences-and-trust-in-the-ai-model/"
linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7441056404070756352"
author: "Ivan Nosov"
---

# Distillation, licences and trust in the AI model ecosystem

The AI model ecosystem right now.

Moonshot AI used 24,000 fake accounts and 3.4 million interactions to distill capabilities from Claude into their Kimi model.

Cursor, valued at $50 billion, quietly built Composer 2 on top of that same Kimi - while also selling Claude access to its users. When a developer exposed the model ID in the API, Moonshot's head of pretraining publicly called out the license violation.

Those posts were deleted hours later. By evening, everyone was congratulating each other.

Composer 1 was DeepSeek. Composer 2 is Kimi. The benchmark gaps between frontier models are narrowing quarter by quarter, while the food chain gets more circular - models training on models, everyone's output becoming everyone else's input.

This is why the model layer was never the strategic bet.

I use Claude today. It's the strongest tool I've found for the work I do. If Kimi or Gemini or something from a garage in Shenzhen pulls ahead next quarter, I'll switch without thinking twice. The knowledge I've built, the structured workflows, the infrastructure underneath... none of it is locked to a model. When your work is organized in formats any model can parse, switching costs drop to near zero.

The organizations paying the price right now are the ones who optimized for a specific tool's quirks instead of making their processes legible to any tool. Prompt libraries tuned to one model. Workflows that depend on a particular vendor's context window. Knowledge trapped in formats only one integration can read.

The model wars make for good memes. The position worth holding is the one where you don't care who wins them.