Anthropic details distillation campaigns by Alibaba, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek
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| Source: TechCrunch | Original article
Anthropic's Thursday report claims Chinese AI firms Alibaba, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek have been conducting ongoing distillation attacks, which have intensified as competition grows.
Anthropic on Thursday released a detailed report accusing several China‑based AI firms of running large‑scale “distillation” campaigns against its Claude models. The company says it logged 151 million exchanges between May and July 2026, with daily peaks approaching three million queries. Those interactions were spread across roughly 3,500 accounts that all used a single, fixed prompt designed to pull the model’s chain‑of‑thought reasoning.
Anthropic attributes the bulk of the activity to an effort to harvest training data for Alibaba’s Qwen family of models. A separate campaign linked to Moonshot AI, the maker of the Kimi chatbot, appeared to route requests directly from the Chinese military. The report also names DeepSeek, Z.ai, Xiaomi, SenseTime and MiniMax as participants in similar unauthorized extraction efforts.
The allegations matter because they suggest a coordinated, high‑volume attempt to copy proprietary capabilities from a leading Western foundation model. If true, the practice could give rival firms a shortcut to advanced reasoning abilities without investing in comparable research, eroding competitive advantage and raising intellectual‑property concerns. Moreover, the involvement of state‑linked actors heightens geopolitical tensions around AI development and underscores the difficulty of policing cross‑border model misuse.
Anthropic’s disclosure follows a series of warnings from the company about AI‑related threats, including the existential risk scenario we covered on Sep 11. The next steps to watch include any formal responses from the named Chinese companies, potential regulatory or legal actions in the United States or Europe, and how Anthropic will adjust its access controls or monitoring tools. Industry observers will also be keen to see whether other foundation‑model providers experience similar distillation attempts and how the broader AI ecosystem adapts to protect its most valuable assets.
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