Anthropic has accused several Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories of secretly using its Claude models on an industrial scale to help develop their own AI systems, highlighting the increasingly intense technological rivalry between China and the United States.
Claude
According to Anthropic, three Chinese AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax — generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
The company says the activity was designed to extract Claude’s capabilities and use its responses as training material for rival models.
Distillation
The technique, known as distillation, is not inherently illegal or unusual. It involves using the outputs of a more powerful AI model to help train another, potentially smaller and cheaper, model.
AI companies themselves use distillation for legitimate purposes. Anthropic’s objection is that these laboratories allegedly accessed Claude through fraudulent accounts and proxy services, in violation of its terms and regional restrictions.
Exchanges
Anthropic says DeepSeek generated more than 150,000 exchanges, while Moonshot produced more than 3.4 million and MiniMax more than 13 million.
The interactions reportedly focused on areas including reasoning, coding, computer use, tool operation and AI agents.
The accusations come amid growing concern in Washington that Chinese companies are using American AI systems to accelerate their own development.
Dispute
Earlier this month, U.S. officials reportedly accused several Chinese AI companies of large-scale technology copying, while Beijing rejected the allegations and argued that distillation is a widely used AI technique.
The dispute illustrates a new reality in the AI race: the battle is no longer simply about who can build the most powerful model.
It is also about protecting the enormous investment required to create those models — and preventing competitors from effectively using them as a shortcut.
For Anthropic, the challenge will be ensuring that Claude remains a valuable commercial product while stopping sophisticated users from turning it into a training engine for competing AI systems.