Anthropic Accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of Large-Scale Distillation Attacks on Claude

16 Million Exchanges via 24,000 Fake Accounts

Anthropic publicly accused three Chinese AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — of coordinated campaigns to illegally extract Claude's capabilities through model distillation, the company revealed on February 24, 2026.

Scale of the Attack

The numbers are staggering:

• Total exchanges: Over 16 million
• Fraudulent accounts: Approximately 24,000
• Largest offender: MiniMax, with over 13 million exchanges
• Focus areas: Complex reasoning, coding assistance, and tool use — areas Anthropic considers key differentiators for Claude

What is Distillation?

Distillation is a technique where a less capable model is trained on the outputs generated by a stronger AI system. In this case, the Chinese firms allegedly used commercial proxy services and fraudulent accounts to access Claude at scale while avoiding detection, then used the outputs to train their own models.

National Security Implications

Anthropic framed the attacks as national security threats, expressing concern about "authoritarian governments deploying frontier AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance."

Industry-Wide Problem

OpenAI has reported similar distillation attacks from Chinese firms. The revelation comes as the U.S. debates AI chip export controls and the broader implications of Chinese AI development.

Anthropic said it has implemented new detection systems and banned the accounts involved.

Source: CNBC | The Hacker News | TechCrunch | CNN | Anthropic