Unlike Claude models which always hide the thinking process, Chinese models always show it. So how the heck they can delegate the api call to anthropic and still get the full reasoning? Yes there are tricks to reveal the thinking output, but they are just tricks and do not works reliably. So what would happen when they failed to do it? Cancel the ongoing token generation and revert back to it own model? What about the glitches, the delays, the changes in behavior?
I would understand if the attempts are small in volume, because normally people hardly notice it, but anthropic claims that they happened for millions of calls. Such large numbers would surely get noticed by Chinese users and got reported in the tech forums like linux.do. yet we haven't seen any sight.
So it is not that the labs call the requests parallely and only return the internal version, but also serve those requests live so they can trick the users that the Chinese models are also great.
Which is very silly considering Chinese models are published to huggingface for everyone to test.
I don't think nobody would notice such delays, because Chinese models do not need to hide the CoT like US models so usually they start emit text pretty soon