Posted on 02/25/2026 5:50:24 AM PST by Twotone
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, Anthropic named three AI firms, including DeepSeek, the maker of the popular DeepSeek AI models. Anthropic explicitly framed the attack as an issue of national security.
"We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models," reads the blog post. "These labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions." You May Also Like Samsung Galaxy Unpacked rumor roundup | Tech Today
In January, OpenAI also accused DeepSeek of engaging in distillation attacks, effectively stealing its technology.
At the time, many people reacted not with sympathy, but with mocking, as OpenAI and other AI companies have claimed they have the absolute right to train their models on copyrighted works without permission or payment. Typically, AI industry supporters say they have no choice but to train on copyrighted works because Chinese competitors are sure to ignore copyright laws anyway.
"You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for," President Donald Trump said at an AI event in July 2025. "When a person reads a book or an article, you've gained great knowledge. That does not mean that you're violating copyright laws or have to make deals with every content provider." He also added, "China’s not doing it." SEE ALSO: Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6: Benchmark performance, how to try it
That puts AI companies in the awkward position of claiming their intellectual property is off-limits for model training, while also engaging in similar behavior themselves. What are distillation attacks?
Distillation is a common training technique for large-language models; however, it can also be used to effectively reverse-engineer some aspects of the technology. In distillation, AI researchers run variations of the same prompt repeatedly to see how a particular model responds.
"Distillation is a widely used and legitimate training method. For example, frontier AI labs routinely distill their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions for their customers. But distillation can also be used for illicit purposes: competitors can use it to acquire powerful capabilities from other labs in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently."
Chinese companies have a reputation for flagrantly ignoring intellectual property treaties and copyright laws, and reverse-engineering technology from Western companies. However, while Anthropic says the distillation attacks it uncovered violated its terms of service, it's not clear that they violated any international laws, or what remedy Anthropic has besides suspending the violating accounts.
To prevent attacks like this, Anthropic called for cooperation between AI companies, government agencies, and other stakeholders. Related Stories
Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6: Benchmark performance, how to try it Anthropic Super Bowl LX ads mock ChatGPT China drafting first of its kind 'emotional safety' regulation for AI
AI companies like Anthropic, xAI, Meta, and OpenAI are in the midst of one of the largest spending booms ever seen, with tens of billions of dollars being poured into AI infrastructure, data centers, and research and development. If rival foreign AI companies can cheaply recreate their LLM technology using distillation, they would clearly have an advantage over their U.S. rivals.
"These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication," the blog post reads. "The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region. Addressing it will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the global AI community."
Mashable reached out to Anthropic with questions about the distillation attacks, and we'll update this article if we receive a response.
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The Chinese cannot innovate a single darn thing, everything they have is stolen and govern the group think culture they have they will never be creators, imitators yes, creators never.
Chinese culture is regressive and cannot exist apart from better cultures that can actually innovate and think forward into the future.
They will eventually infect themselves, much like with Covid and be unable to “undo”.
Excellent post — right on the money. What’s more, their inherent greed leads to system-wide corruption, which in turn leads to “tofu dregs” throughout their economy and infrastructure. They’re certainly not the world-beaters they imagine themselves to be.
That’s what I was going to say.
So, if I understand correctly, an AI company - whose business model is to extract and refine data from others for their own benefit - is upset that other AI companies are extracting and refining data from them for their own benefit.
FWIW, Elon Musk disagrees. Right now, China has more AI data scientists than we do, and he sees China as his top competitor.
I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember, but people said the same about Japanese products in the 60’s. Then they kicked out butts in the manuufacturing space.
Thieves who stole from thieves.
I do remember and Japan was like that until their culture changed and allowed for innovative thought.
China has not gone through such a transformation which imo makes your point void.
You can’t force innovative thinking with cult culture group think. You comparison is not accurate.
No communist culture has shown innovation to date.
Outrageous. No way should we stand for an attack on our distilleries of our most sacred bourbon. This is a declaration of war.
“The Chinese cannot innovate a single darn thing, everything they have is stolen”
You really should give them more credit. For one thing they sure didn’t steal their hyper sonic missile tech.
China’s ‘artificial sun’ reactor shatters major fusion limit — a step closer to near-limitless clean energy
LOL yaa, might want to look into their supposed hypersonic missile tech.
Just like their first “Aircraft Carriers” which had a raised bow. Quite a few expects are very suspect of that technology, so I am not convinced, in the least, they have shown any real prowess in such technology.
Get back to me when they actually can demonstrate with verifiable evidence such technology.
What this story is reveals just how well A.I. can build a picture from just a few scraps of information.
“LOL yaa, might want to look into their supposed hypersonic missile tech.”
Chinese Navy Destroyer Tests Hypersonic Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile At Sea
China’s Hypersonic ICBM Test Shocks the World: Depressed Trajectory and Boost-Glide Weapon Advances
https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/china-hypersonic-icbm-test-depressed-trajectory-boost-glide/
Not convincing in the least. First hypersonic is not new, second where is the evidence they maneuver at such speeds effectively for combat, third have you no idea how the US military literally undersells all our capabilities?
You do realize the US has had hypersonic missiles since the 60s right?
DO you know what the actual issue is with the supposed “new hypersonic” missiles, what supposedly makes them different? That has not been demonstrated but only claimed to date?
How many missiles do you suppose it would take to overwhelm US defenses? 100,000? more ? How long before the very expensive defense missiles give out. At that point all the money in the world won’t help. Once you’re so broke you can’t your missiles. You can’t come up with enough money to field enough missiles to stop someone determined to come.
Not sure your what you are presenting in this last post? Are you just shilling for China or actually can show where they have now managed to achieve world military supremacy because no one is making that claim but you seem to be here.
No I’m trying to stop you from being so blasé that you discount China as a dangerous foe. They are not the washy washy people from some 1800’s western, the image you convey with your dismissal. Sun Tzu said not to underestimate your enemy. If if come down to a numbers game China will win hands down.
Well done.
I hope you’re right!
so ban chinese IPs from connecting?
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