tech
February 24, 2026
Anthropic joins OpenAI in flagging 'industrial-scale' distillation campaigns by Chinese AI firms
Anthropic accused three Chinese artificial intelligence enterprises of engaging in coordinated distillation campaigns, the latest American tech firm to do so.
TL;DR
- Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of coordinated 'distillation attack' campaigns.
- The Chinese firms allegedly used proxy services to circumvent restrictions and access Claude.
- Distillation involves flooding an AI model with prompts to extract its knowledge for training smaller models.
- Anthropic estimated over 16 million exchanges were generated from 24,000 fraudulently created accounts.
- MiniMax reportedly generated the most traffic, with over 13 million exchanges.
- Anthropic and OpenAI view these campaigns as potential national security threats.
- The practice of distillation is common in the AI industry but raises concerns about competitive advantage and misuse by authoritarian governments.
- Reports suggest DeepSeek may have trained on Nvidia's Blackwell chip, potentially violating export controls.
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