Anthropic Exposes Massive AI Theft: Chinese Firms Used 24K Fake Accounts

What Happened Anthropic discovered that DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI had created thousands of fake accounts to systematically extract knowledge from its Claude AI model. The scheme involved more than 16 million exchanges with Claude across 24,000 fraudulent accounts, representing one of the largest known cases of AI model theft. The technique, called “distillation,” involves using responses from an advanced AI model to train a smaller, more efficient version. While distillation is a legitimate research method when done with permission, Anthropic says these companies violated its terms of service by conducting the practice without authorization and at massive scale.