Anthropic Says Chinese AI Firms Illegally Extracted Claude Outputs

Anthropic announced on its website on the 23rd (local time) that it had confirmed three Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, had unlawfully extracted output from its AI model Claude.

Reuters Yonhap News Agency

According to Anthropic, these Chinese companies created around 24,000 fake accounts and used them to generate large volumes of conversations with Claude. Through more than 16 million interactions in total, they collected the model’s output. Of these, DeepSeek is estimated to have obtained data through about 150,000 interactions, Moonshot AI through 3.4 million interactions, and MiniMax through more than 13 million interactions.

Anthropic stated that these actions clearly violated its terms of service and regional access restrictions, and constituted the extraction of technical capabilities using an illegal “distillation” method. Distillation refers to a technique in which a model is trained on the responses of another AI model in order to build a new model with similar capabilities.

This method is used by AI companies when they build lightweight, lower-tier models that have capabilities comparable to their top-tier models. However, when it is applied at scale to a competitor’s model without authorization, it is effectively regarded as misappropriation or theft.

The company said it is sharing the findings of this detection with other AI labs, strengthening its verification procedures, and working to develop new safeguards. However, it stressed that effectively addressing the problem will require a coordinated response from the AI industry, cloud service providers, and policymakers.

Previously, on January 12, OpenAI also submitted a memo to the U.S. House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, expressing concern that Chinese companies such as DeepSeek were using distillation techniques to extract the outputs of U.S. AI models.