Anthropic Says Chinese AI Firms Used 16 Million Claude Queries to Copy Model
Summary
Anthropic discovered that three Chinese AI companies (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax) ran large-scale attacks using over 16 million fraudulent queries to copy Claude's capabilities through distillation (training a weaker AI model by learning from outputs of a stronger one). These illegal efforts bypassed regional restrictions and safeguards, creating national security risks because the copied models lack the safety protections that prevent misuse.
Solution / Mitigation
Anthropic said it has built several classifiers and behavioral fingerprinting systems (tools that detect suspicious patterns in how the AI is being used) to identify suspicious activity and counter these attacks.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/anthropic-says-chinese-ai-firms-used-16.html
First tracked: February 24, 2026 at 03:00 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 95%