Anthropic's crackdown on AI copycats may be hurting its revenue growth

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Anthropic's revenue growth slowed in the third quarter.

Some of its revenue has come from rivals distilling Anthropic models.

Cracking down on distillation may have dented revenue growth recently.

Anthropic's revenue growth slowed in the third quarter, disappointing some investors as the AI startup prepares to go public.

There's an intriguing explanation for at least part of the slowdown: The company may be getting better at stopping rivals from stealing its AI secrets.

Anthropic generated $16.8 billion in revenue during the third quarter, my colleague Stephen Council reported on Wednesday.

While that's impressive growth by almost any standard, but it's a slowdown from earlier in the year.

Here's where things get interesting.

Anthropic told prospective investors this week that 5% to 7% of its revenue comes from something called distillation , The Information reported .

This is when rival AI developers use Anthropic's Claude models to help train their own competing systems.

One way to do this is to create thousands of Anthropic accounts and bombard Claude with carefully chosen questions.

The rivals collect the answers and use them to teach their own AI models how to perform similar tasks.

All these "distillation" accounts and questions generate revenue for Anthropic, even though the customers are effectively trying to copy its technology.