Ravie LakshmananSep 11, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Cybercrime
Anthropic on Thursday said it identified and disrupted industrial-scale illicit distillation attacks against Claude from seven labs based in China, including Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai (aka Zhipu), and MiniMax.
Knowledge distillation by itself is a legitimate training method. It refers to a machine learning technique where a large, powerful AI model assumes the role of a "teacher" to train a smaller, less-capable or faster "student" model to copy its capabilities.
Illicit distillation, on the other hand, is an industrial-scale campaign that covertly extracts a model's capabilities and replicates them in another model without authorization, typically by making use of networks of fake accounts created with stolen credit cards, login credentials, and API keys.
Frontier AI labs in the West, including those from Google and OpenAI, have repeatedly called out distillation attacks aimed at their models. Anthropic said it has observed unauthorized labs employing "increasingly sophisticated methods" to get around defenses and harvest its capabilities, such as agentic capabilities and tool use, coding and data analysis, and logical reasoning, through prompt manipulation tricks.
