Anthropic's distillation battle turns to the dark web as China concerns swell

Anthropic reports that foreign adversaries, particularly from China, are illegally using distillation (a process where one AI system learns from another AI's outputs to create a competing model) to access and copy its Claude AI models, then sell cheaper versions. The attackers use various methods including stolen credit cards and fraudulent accounts obtained on the dark web to bypass Anthropic's security controls and extract large amounts of data from the models.