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 and MiniMax — the three firms in question — engaged in concerted “distillation attack” campaigns, flooding Claude with large volumes of specially-crafted prompts to train proprietary models.
Through distillation, smaller AI models are able to mimic the performance of larger, pre-trained models by extracting knowledge from the better-trained model, a technique particularly useful for smaller teams with fewer resources.
Despite Anthropic’s service restrictions preventing commercial access to Claude in China, the three firms allegedly engaged commercial proxy services to sidestep Anthropic’s restrictions, enabling access to networks running tens of thousands of Claude accounts simultaneously.
“Once access is secured, the labs generate large volumes of carefully crafted prompts designed to extract specific capabilities from the model,” Anthropic said in the statement.
