Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using 24,000 fake accounts to distill Claude’s AI capabilities, as U.S. officials debate export controls aimed at slowing China’s AI progress.

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Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — of creating over 24,000 fake accounts to conduct large-scale distillation attacks against its Claude model, generating more than 16 million exchanges to extract capabilities in agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding. The accusations arrive amid ongoing U.S. debates over AI chip export controls to China. Anthropic argues that these attacks reinforce the case for stricter chip export restrictions, since the scale of distillation requires access to advanced hardware. The company also warns that models built through illicit distillation may lack safety guardrails, posing national security risks including potential misuse for bioweapons development or cyberattacks.

Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports

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