Anthropic alleges three Chinese AI companies used fake accounts to ‘distill’ its Claude chatbot, violating terms and raising security concerns.
SAN FRANCISCO: Anthropic has accused three Chinese artificial intelligence companies of improperly using its Claude chatbot to improve their own models. The creator of Claude detailed the alleged activity in a blog post, using it to argue for stricter export controls on advanced chips.
The companies named are DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax. Anthropic stated they created over 16 million interactions with Claude using approximately 24,000 fake accounts, breaching its terms of service and regional access rules.
They employed a technique called “distillation,” which involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a more powerful one. “These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” Anthropic warned in its blog.
“The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region.” The company argued that illicitly distilled models lack necessary safeguards, posing significant national security risks.
It stated the risk multiplies if such models are open-sourced, allowing capabilities to spread freely beyond government control. The allegations follow a recent memo from OpenAI warning US lawmakers about similar targeting by Chinese AI firms.
Anthropic, valued at USD 380 billion after a USD 30 billion funding round, said distillation attacks bolster the case for chip export controls. It argued restricting chip access limits both direct model training and the scale of improper distillation.
Detailing the campaigns, Anthropic said DeepSeek targeted reasoning capabilities and creating censorship-safe alternatives to sensitive queries. Moonshot allegedly focused on agentic reasoning, tool use, coding and data analysis.
MiniMax targeted agentic coding and tool orchestration. Anthropic detected its campaign while it was still active, before MiniMax released the model it was training.
“When we released a new model during MiniMax’s active campaign, they pivoted within 24 hours,” the blog post stated. It said they redirected nearly half their traffic to capture capabilities from the latest system.
DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Sun Malaysia
