Anthropic Accuses Chinese AI Firms of Theft

Anthropic has accused three Chinese AI companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Minimax, of conducting large-scale 'distillation' attacks on its Claude AI model. These companies allegedly created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude to extract its capabilities and improve their own models. Anthropic claims this activity violates its terms of service and poses national security risks by potentially stripping safeguards from AI models. OpenAI has also made similar accusations against DeepSeek. The incident intensifies the debate over U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips to China, with critics arguing that such illicit distillation reinforces the need for stricter controls. Anthropic is calling for a coordinated response from the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers to combat these sophisticated attacks.