Anthropic, a San Francisco AI company, publicly accused three Chinese AI labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — of launching large-scale, coordinated campaigns using approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from its Claude AI models. These labs generated over 16 million interactions with Claude, violating Anthropic’s terms of service and regional restrictions, with the intent to shortcut years of research investment through a technique called distillation. This process involves extracting knowledge from a larger AI (the “teacher”) to train a smaller one (the “student”) by using the teacher’s outputs instead of raw data. While distillation is a legitimate training method, Anthropic claims these labs weaponized it by systematically siphoning AI capabilities at scale. The revelations heighten tensions amid U.S.-China debates over AI chip export controls, with Anthropic framing the issue as a national security risk rather than just intellectual property theft. The labs allegedly employed sophisticated proxy networks to bypass restrictions, and Anthropic is calling for industry-wide collaboration to tackle this escalating threat. The company has made technological, verification, and protective adjustments in response but stresses that collective action is required to safeguard frontier AI models.
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