{"id":41570,"date":"2026-02-24T09:04:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T09:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=41570"},"modified":"2026-02-24T09:04:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T09:04:26","slug":"us-ai-giants-accuse-chinese-rivals-of-mass-data-theft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=41570","title":{"rendered":"US AI giants accuse Chinese rivals of mass data theft"},"content":{"rendered":"
US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft.<\/p>\n

Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.<\/p>\n

“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” the company said in a statement. “The window to act is narrow”.<\/p>\n

Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.<\/p>\n

The practice grabbed headlines a year ago when the release of a low-cost generative AI model from DeepSeek performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top American chatbots, upending assumptions of US dominance in the sensitive sector.<\/p>\n

Read: YouTube exec says goal was viewer value not addiction<\/p>\n

Anthropic said the companies achieved their ends through approximately 16 million exchanges with its Claude model and 24,000 fake accounts.<\/p>\n

These allowed the three labs to siphon off capabilities they had not independently developed, at a fraction of the cost — and in so doing circumvented export controls on powerful US technology intended to preserve American dominance in AI.<\/p>\n

The company argued the practice posed national security risks, saying models built through illicit distillation are unlikely to retain safety guardrails designed to prevent misuse — such as restrictions on helping develop bioweapons or enabling cyberattacks.<\/p>\n

Anthropic’s archrival OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, made similar accusations to US lawmakers earlier this month, saying Chinese companies were using the technique amid “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs”.<\/p>\n

Anthropic said MiniMax ran the largest operation, generating more than 13 million exchanges.
\nEach campaign concentrated heavily on coding, agentic reasoning, and tool use — areas where Claude is considered a leader.<\/p>\n

To circumvent Anthropic’s ban on commercial access from China, the labs allegedly routed traffic through proxy services that managed the vast networks of fraudulent accounts.<\/p>\n

Anthropic called for coordinated industry and government responses to address what it said no single company could tackle alone.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using outputs from a more powerful AI system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}