Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI laboratories of conducting large-scale data extraction campaigns from its Claude AI model, alleging the companies used fraudulent accounts to illicitly improve their own systems. The AI company claims DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax generated over 16 million exchanges through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, violating terms of service and regional access restrictions.

These Chinese laboratories employed distillation techniques, training less capable models on outputs from Claude's more advanced system. While distillation is a legitimate training method when used by companies on their own models, Anthropic alleges this practice became illicit when competitors used it to acquire capabilities from other laboratories. The campaigns specifically targeted Claude's most advanced features, including reasoning capabilities, tool use, and coding functions.

Anthropic identified the operations through IP address correlation, request metadata, and infrastructure indicators. DeepSeek reportedly generated over 150,000 exchanges focused on reasoning capabilities and rubric-based grading tasks. Moonshot AI conducted over 3.4 million exchanges targeting reasoning, tool use, coding, and computer vision capabilities. MiniMax generated over 13 million exchanges focused on coding and tool use. The company said it has built detection systems and behavioral fingerprinting tools to identify distillation attack patterns in API traffic and is sharing technical indicators with other AI laboratories, cloud providers, and authorities.