Anthropic alleges Chinese firms scraped Claude via distillation
Anthropic alleges large-scale distillation attacks by three China-based AI firms
Anthropic said it has identified extensive “distillation” campaigns by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax that allegedly used the company’s Claude model to bolster their own systems. In a blog post published Sunday, the firm stated the activity involved training less capable models on outputs from a more advanced model.
The company reported “over 16 million exchanges” with Claude generated through “approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.” Anthropic noted that model distillation is a common and legitimate method when applied to a lab’s own systems, but warned it can be misused by competitors to acquire advanced capabilities more quickly and at lower cost than developing them independently.
According to Anthropic, the campaigns sought to extract Claude’s most distinctive strengths, including agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding. The firm said prompts also covered coding and data analysis, rubric-based grading tasks, and computer vision.
Anthropic said it linked the activity to the three firms using a combination of IP address correlation, request metadata, infrastructure indicators, and corroboration from industry partners that observed similar behavior on their platforms. DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax are China-based AI companies, each with multi-billion-dollar valuations, with DeepSeek described as the most internationally recognized among them.
The company cautioned that such distillation efforts by foreign competitors could create broader national security concerns, asserting that unprotected capabilities derived from American models could be integrated into military, intelligence, and surveillance systems to enable offensive cyber operations, disinformation, and mass surveillance.
Anthropic said it plans to enhance detection to identify suspicious traffic, share threat intelligence, and tighten access controls. It also called for coordinated action across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers, stating that no single company can address large-scale distillation campaigns on its own.
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