Research · curated 30 Jul 2026
What a Distilled Model Inherits From Its Teacher
First reported ctgt.ai
Coverage timeline
Single-source research — first reported, latest, and curated coincide.
Why it matters
Distillation from foreign open models raises AI supply-chain and provenance concerns, and CTGT's LineageEval provides a way for defenders to measure which behaviors a student model inherits from its teacher.
CTGT researchers studied whether undesired behaviors like Chinese-state censorship transfer from a heavily censored Chinese teacher model into a distilled student model in a finance-focused distillation pipeline. They found the student gained financial-reasoning skill without inheriting the teacher's refusals on China-sensitive prompts, and released model weights, data, and the LineageEval benchmark on Hugging Face and GitHub to measure such lineage effects.