Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of industrial-scale theft as chip export debate intensifies
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Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports | TechCrunch
Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models. The labs -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax -- allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a
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Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI
Anthropic claims DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI companies misused its Claude AI model in an attempt to improve their own products. In an announcement on Monday, Anthropic says the "industrial-scale campaigns" involved the creation of around 24,000 fraudulent accounts and more than 16 million
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Anthropic Slams China for AI Theft, But Critics Say the Outrage Is Hypocritical
Anthropic is accusing Chinese developers of stealing Claude chatbot trade secrets, but critics note that Anthropic itself has a record of scraping the internet for AI training. On Monday, the San Francisco company said the Chinese firms behind DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax "created over
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Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, other Chinese AI developers of 'industrial-scale' copying -- Claims 'distillation' included 24,000 fraudulent accounts and 16 million exchanges to train smaller models
Anthropic on Monday accused three leading Chinese developers of frontier AI models of using large-scale distillation to improve their own models by using Anthropic's Claude capabilities. In total, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax made 16 million exchanges using 24,000 fraudulent
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The AI Power Struggle Is Out of Silicon Valley's Control
Anthropic PBC's latest complaint against three Chinese labs is a warning sign for Silicon Valley: Don't expect to earn too much from the competitive edge your model gives you. Companies from the developing world will line up to swim across your moat, if they can -- and neither the US government nor
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Anthropic misanthropic toward China's AI labs
Says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax are using 'distillation' to gin up their own models Having built a business by remixing content created by others, Anthropic worries that Chinese AI labs are stealing its data. The US-based maker of Claude models on Monday accused China-based DeepSeek,
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Anthropic Says Chinese AI Firms Used 16 Million Claude Queries to Copy Model
Anthropic on Monday said it identified "industrial-scale campaigns" mounted by three artificial intelligence (AI) companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, to illegally extract Claude's capabilities to improve their own models. The distillation attacks generated over 16 million exchanges with
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Chinese companies used Claude to improve own models, Anthropic says
Feb 23 (Reuters) - Three Chinese companies have tried to use Claude to improperly obtain capabilities to improve their own models, the chatbot's creator Anthropic said in a blog post on Monday. DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax created more than 16 million interactions with Claude using roughly
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Anthropic joins OpenAI in flagging 'industrial-scale' distillation campaigns by Chinese AI firms
Anthropic on Monday accused three Chinese AI enterprises of engaging in coordinated campaigns to extract information from its model, making it the latest American tech firm to level such claims after OpenAI issued similar complaints. According to a statement from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI
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Anthropic accuses three Chinese AI labs of abusing Claude to improve their own models
Anthropic is issuing a call to action against AI "distillation attacks," after accusing three AI companies of misusing its Claude chatbot. On its website, Anthropic claimed that DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax have been conducting "industrial-scale campaigns...to illicitly extract Claude's
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Anthropic Accuses 3 Chinese Companies of Harvesting Its Data
The San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic has accused three Chinese companies of improperly harvesting large amounts of data from its A.I. technologies in an effort to accelerate the development of their own systems. Anthropic said in a blog post that DeepSeek, Moonshot and
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Anthropic Says DeepSeek, MiniMax Distilled AI Models for Gains
Anthropic said it has built better detection and verification systems to mitigate the risk of distillation campaigns and is sharing information with other AI labs to help address the issue. Anthropic PBC said three leading artificial intelligence developers in China worked to "illicitly extract"
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Anthropic Says Chinese AI Companies Improved Models By 'Illicitly' Copying Its Capabilities
Did you know that there's a way of using outputs from LLMs that may involve no hackingâ€"essentially just taking large quantities of text and repurposing it as training dataâ€"that upsets AI companies a great deal? In a blog post on Monday, Anthropic said that the China-based AI companies
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Anthropic says DeepSeek, other Chinese AI firms extracted Claude data
Anthropic has accused three major Chinese AI firms of using fraudulent accounts to extract data from its Claude models in an effort to boost rival systems. The San Francisco-based company said DeepSeek, MiniMax Group Inc. and Moonshot collectively generated more than 16 million exchanges with
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Anthropic exposes how Chinese AI firms try to steal LLM tech
Anthropic is accusing three Chinese artificial intelligence companies of "industrial-scale campaigns" to "illicitly extract" its technology using distillation attacks. Anthropic says these companies created 24,000 fraudulent accounts to hide these efforts. In a blog post detailing the attacks,
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Anthropic says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used 24,000 fake accounts to rip off Claude
Anthropic dropped a bombshell on the artificial intelligence industry Monday, publicly accusing three prominent Chinese AI laboratories -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax -- of orchestrating coordinated, industrial-scale campaigns to siphon capabilities from its Claude models using tens of
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US AI giant accuses Chinese rivals of mass data theft
Anthropic says three Chinese firms used 'distillation' technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it
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Anthropic claims 3 Chinese companies ripped it off, using its AI tools to train their models: 'How the turn tables' | Fortune
Anthropic has accused three prominent Chinese artificial intelligence firms of using its Claude chatbot on a massive scale to secretly train rival models, an unexpected development in a years-long global debate over where fraud ends and industry standard practice begins. In a blog post on Monday,
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Anthropic Furious at DeepSeek for Copying Its AI Without Permission, Which Is Pretty Ironic When You Consider How It Built Claude in the First Place
Earlier this month, Google publicly griped that "commercially motivated" actors were trying to clone its Gemini AI through agents that queried the chatbot up to 100,000 times to "extract" the underlying model. The hypocrisy of Google's accusations was palpable. For years, the search giant has
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Critics Mock Anthropic's Claims Chinese AI Labs Are Stealing Its Data - Decrypt
Critics on X are accusing Anthropic of hypocrisy over how AI models are trained. Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI labs of extracting millions of responses from its Claude chatbot to train competing systems, a move the company claims violates its terms of service and weakens U.S. export
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The AI Cold War: US firms claim Chinese companies stole research
So-called distillation attacks gather responses from AI models to teach smaller ones. As the United States and China race to develop artificial intelligence (AI), American firm Anthropic is the latest company to sound the alarm that Chinese AI companies have been stealing the technology that could
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Anthropic says it has identified thousands of 'fraudulent accounts' taking Claude and 'extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models'
The question of what data AI models are trained on, and the legitimacy of that data, is a thorny one. Anthropic found itself defending its use of copyrighted material to train its Claude AI in the US last year, a case that eventually resulted in a ruling that its copyrighted scraping fell under
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Chinese AI companies 'distilled' Claude to improve own models, Anthropic says
Three Chinese artificial intelligence companies used Claude to improperly obtain capabilities to improve their own models, the chatbot's creator Anthropic said in a blog post Monday while also making a case for export controls on chips. The announcement follows a memo by OpenAI earlier this month,
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Anthropic slams Chinese AI firms for harvesting data from its Claude chatbot - SiliconANGLE
Anthropic slams Chinese AI firms for harvesting data from its Claude chatbot Anthropic PBC is claiming that three Chinese artificial intelligence companies are illegally harvesting massive amounts of data from its chatbot Claude in an effort to accelerate the development of their own
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Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of industrial-scale distillation attacks
Anthropic accused three Chinese AI companies of industrial-scale distillation attacks using its Claude chatbot. The company named DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax as responsible for campaigns intended to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities. Anthropic stated these firms used approximately 24,000
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Why AI Companies Are Suddenly Worried About Theft
On February 23, Anthropic published a broadside to confront a threat that requires "rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the global AI community." Three Chinese AI firms, it said, had been waging "industrial-scale campaigns" to "illicitly extract" proprietary
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Anthropic Says It Blocked Attempts to Distill Its AI Models by Rival Labs
Anthropic built new detection systems as part of the countermeasures Anthropic on Tuesday accused China-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including DeepSeek, of attempting to extract knowledge from its AI systems using a technique known as distillation. The US-based AI firm said it
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Anthropic vs China: The grand AI heist is a hall of mirrors
A new front has opened in the global AI race, focusing on theft and national security. American AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI accuse Chinese companies of stealing advanced AI capabilities. Meanwhile, these American firms face accusations of data theft themselves. The situation involves complex
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Elon Musk Calls Anthropic Guilty Of Stealing AI Training Data At 'Massive Scale' After Amazon-Backed Company Accuses Chinese Rivals Of Copying - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
On Monday, xAI CEO Elon Musk escalated his feud after Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)-backed Anthropic accused Chinese firms like DeepSeek of copying its Claude model. Anthropic Alleges 'Industrial-Scale' AI Distillation Anthropic said that Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and
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Anthropic says Chinese AI labs stole data from Claude to train rival models
Chinese AI laboratories DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax have launched a large-scale campaign to steal and replicate data from Anthropic's Claude, the AI company said in a Tuesday statement. Anthropic is the artificial intelligence company that developed Claude, the popular series of large language
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Days after OpenAI warning, Anthropic accuses three Chinese AI labs of extracting its data
Anthropic Data scrapped: According to the San Francisco-headquartered Anthropic, the three labs generated more than 16 million interactions with Claude using roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts, violating the company's terms of service and regional restrictions. American artificial intelligence
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Anthropic Alleges Rival AI Firms Used Claude at Scale to Develop Their Own Advanced Models
The labs involved were DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. According to Anthropic, the activity violated its terms of service and regional access restrictions, and reflected deliberate, large scale capability extraction rather than legitimate usage. Distillation is a common technique in artificial
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Anthropic Rallies Industry to Combat AI Model Theft | PYMNTS.com
By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The firms used a technique called "distillation," in which the outputs of a
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Anthropic Says Chinese Labs Used 24,000 Fake Accounts To Rip Off Claude: Here's What It Means For AMZN, PLTR - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
Anthropic accused three Chinese AI companies of running 24,000 fraudulent accounts to siphon capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what may be the largest documented case of AI model theft to date. DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, violating
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Anthropic accuses three Chinese companies of harvesting its data - The Economic Times
The San Francisco artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has accused three Chinese companies of improperly harvesting large amounts of data from its AI technologies in an effort to accelerate the development of their own systems. Anthropic said in a blog post Monday that DeepSeek, Moonshot and
[36]
Anthropic accuses chinese AI firms of distillation attacks on Claude
US-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has accused Chinese AI companies DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of illicitly extracting the company's Claude AI agent's capabilities to improve their own AI models, as per an official blog post. Anthropic alleges that the above-mentioned
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Anthropic accuses Chinese AI firms of data copying using fake accounts and AI distillation methods
U.S. AI company Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI firms of secretly taking data from its Claude AI system. The three companies named are DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. Anthropic said these companies created more than 24,000 fake accounts on its platform to access Claude. Using those
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Anthropic accuses Chinese AI firms of misusing Claude, Elon Musk fires back
According to the company, these firms created more than 24,000 fake accounts and generated over 16 million interactions with Claude. Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI companies of misusing its Claude chatbot to improve their own artificial intelligence models. The claims quickly drew a
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Anthropic alleges three Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—created over 24,000 fake accounts to extract Claude's capabilities through 16 million exchanges. The accusations spotlight distillation techniques and fuel debates over AI chip export controls, with critics noting the irony given Anthropic's own controversial data scraping practices.
Anthropic Alleges Massive AI Model Theft Campaign
Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI labs of orchestrating what it calls "industrial-scale campaigns" to steal capabilities from its Claude AI model
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. The San Francisco-based company claims that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude to improve their own AI systems2
. The accusations arrive at a critical moment as U.S. policymakers debate the future of AI chip export controls, a policy designed to limit China's AI development.
Source: DT
The alleged AI model theft targeted Claude's most advanced features, including agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding capabilities
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Source: Benzinga
Anthropic says the Chinese AI labs employed a model distillation technique—a legitimate training method that AI companies use on their own models to create smaller, more efficient versions. However, when competitors deploy this approach, it effectively allows them to copy the capabilities of rival labs at a fraction of the development time and cost
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.How the Industrial-Scale Copying Operation Worked
The perpetrators used sophisticated methods to bypass Anthropic's regional access restrictions and commercial blocks on China
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. They tapped commercial proxy services that resell access to frontier AI models at scale, building what Anthropic calls "hydra clusters"—sprawling networks of fraudulent accounts that distribute traffic across APIs and third-party cloud providers4
. In one case, a single proxy network managed more than 20,000 fraudulent accounts simultaneously3
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Source: SiliconANGLE
The scale of illicit model extraction varied significantly across the three companies. DeepSeek conducted over 150,000 exchanges that targeted foundational logic and alignment, specifically seeking censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive queries about dissidents, party leaders, and authoritarianism
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. Anthropic examined metadata on API traffic analysis and traced requests directly to staffers at DeepSeek and Moonshot AI .Moonshot AI, which recently released its open-source Kimi K2.5 model and a coding agent, accounted for more than 3.4 million exchanges targeting agentic reasoning and tool use, coding and data analysis, computer-use agent development, and computer vision
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. MiniMax conducted the largest campaign with over 13 million exchanges focused on agentic coding and orchestration4
. Anthropic observed MiniMax redirecting nearly half its traffic to extract capabilities from Claude's latest model within 24 hours of its launch1
.National Security Risks and AI Chip Export Controls Debate
Anthropic argues that the scale of extraction requires access to advanced chips, reinforcing the rationale for AI chip export controls
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. The company warns that illicit model extraction creates national security risks because models built through distillation are unlikely to retain AI safeguards that prevent malicious actors from using AI to develop bioweapons or carry out cyber operations1
. Foreign labs that distill American models can strip out protections and feed capabilities into military, intelligence, and surveillance systems, enabling authoritarian governments to deploy frontier AI for offensive operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass monitoring2
.Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and co-founder of CrowdStrike, told TechCrunch the findings confirm what many suspected: "It's been clear for a while now that part of the reason for the rapid progress of Chinese AI models has been theft via distillation of US frontier models. Now we know this for a fact"
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. He argued this provides compelling reasons to refuse selling AI chips to these companies.The accusations arrive as the Trump administration formally allowed U.S. companies like Nvidia to export advanced AI chips such as the H200 to China last month
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. Critics have argued that loosening export controls increases China's AI computing capacity at a critical time in the global race for AI dominance.Related Stories
Hypocrisy Claims and Enforcement Challenges
Despite Anthropic's allegations, the company faces accusations of hypocrisy on social media given its controversial record of scraping data across the internet to train Claude
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. This allegedly included using copyrighted books without authors' permission. Programmer Gergely Orosz tweeted, "Sorry but Anthropic can't have it both ways. Also let's not forget how Anthropic itself trained Claude: on copyrighted books, only paying copyright holders after a lawsuit"3
. Elon Musk also weighed in, questioning how Anthropic could complain about theft when it allegedly trained AI on projects from software developers without permission3
.Legal experts note that the violations center on breaches of end-user license agreements and terms of service rather than straightforward intellectual property theft
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. Many legal scholars argue that generative AI companies probably don't own rights over either their models or the output of those models5
. This makes enforcement across international borders particularly challenging, as Silicon Valley confronts the reality that laws which are unenforceable and profitable to break will likely be ignored5
.Industry Response and Future Implications
Anthropic says it will invest in defenses that make distillation attacks harder to execute and easier to identify, deploying classifiers and behavioral fingerprinting systems to detect extraction patterns in API traffic
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. The company is sharing technical indicators with other AI labs, cloud providers, and authorities while tightening verification for educational, research, and startup accounts often used for fraudulent account creation4
.However, Anthropic acknowledges that countering attacks at this scale requires "a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers"
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. The company warns these campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication, with the window to act narrowing3
.As AI becomes more important and revenue-generating, governments and companies in other parts of the world will likely refuse to comply with Silicon Valley's expectations and Washington's demands
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. The more that frontier labs try to monetize their competitive edge, the more likely developing world companies will attempt to swim across their moat. Companies may need to follow the music industry's example—ending piracy not by complaining about the law, but by making products more accessible and raising revenues elsewhere5
.References
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