Anthropic alleges Chinese firms used 16M Claude prompts to clone capabilities

Anthropic says three Chinese AI labs—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—launched industrial-scale distillation attacks against Claude, generating over 16 million exchanges via about 24,000 fraudulent accounts and proxy services. Each campaign targeted different Claude capabilities: DeepSeek for reasoning and censorship-safe responses (≈150,000 exchanges), Moonshot AI for agentic reasoning, tool use, coding, and vision (≈3.4 million), and MiniMax for agentic coding and tool use (≈13 million). The prompts were designed to harvest capabilities for training rival models and evade detection, highlighting significant national-security concerns due to unguarded capabilities. Anthropic says it has strengthened defenses and detection, noting such attacks exploit illicit distillation rather than typical user risk; Google had reported similar attacks earlier.