Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports
Summary
Anthropic accused three Chinese AI companies (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax) of using distillation (a technique where one AI model learns from another by analyzing its outputs) to illegally extract capabilities from Claude by creating over 24,000 fake accounts and generating millions of interactions. This theft targeted Claude's most advanced features like reasoning, tool use, and coding, and raises security concerns because stolen models may lack safeguards against misuse like bioweapon development.
Solution / Mitigation
Anthropic stated it will 'continue to invest in defenses that make distillation attacks harder to execute and easier to identify,' and is calling on 'a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers.' The company also argues that export controls on advanced AI chips to China would limit both direct model training and the scale of such distillation attacks.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
CVE-2026-24747: PyTorch is a Python package that provides tensor computation. Prior to version 2.10.0, a vulnerability in PyTorch's `wei
CVE-2026-26190: Milvus is an open-source vector database built for generative AI applications. Prior to 2.5.27 and 2.6.10, Milvus expose
Original source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/23/anthropic-accuses-chinese-ai-labs-of-mining-claude-as-us-debates-ai-chip-exports/
First tracked: February 23, 2026 at 03:00 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%