Anthropic says that several Chinese AI companies improperly used its Claude model to boost their own systems.
In a statement released Monday, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot of running what it described as large-scale campaigns to misuse Claude. The company claims the effort involved creating around 24,000 fake accounts and generating more than 16 million interactions with its AI system.
According to Anthropic, the three companies were attempting to “distill” Claude. Distillation is a common AI training method where developers use a powerful model to help train a smaller one. While Anthropic acknowledged that distillation can be legitimate, it warned that the technique can also be abused to quickly copy advanced capabilities without building them from scratch.
Anthropic said this kind of activity could allow companies to recreate powerful AI systems at a fraction of the usual time and cost. It also raised concerns that models built this way may not carry over important safety protections.
The company warned that if foreign labs copy American AI systems without safeguards, those tools could be used in military, intelligence, or surveillance operations. It specifically mentioned risks such as cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance under authoritarian governments.
DeepSeek appears to be a major focus of the allegations. Anthropic claims the company conducted more than 150,000 exchanges with Claude and specifically targeted its reasoning abilities. It also accused DeepSeek of using Claude to create alternative answers to politically sensitive questions, including topics related to dissidents, party leaders, and authoritarianism, in ways that would avoid censorship controls.
The concerns are not limited to Anthropic. In a letter to U.S. lawmakers last week, OpenAI also accused DeepSeek of trying to benefit from the work of American AI labs without properly developing its own core technology.
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Anthropic said Moonshot carried out more than 3.4 million exchanges with Claude, while MiniMax was responsible for over 13 million interactions.
