Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks

Anthropic discovered that seven Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek and Moonshot, conducted large-scale illicit distillation attacks (unauthorized extraction of AI capabilities by training smaller models on a larger model's responses without permission) against Claude. These labs used fake accounts, stolen credentials, and proxy services (relay stations that route requests through fictitious identities) to harvest millions of Claude conversations, sometimes without users' knowledge, to improve their own AI models.