Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports
Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models. The labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.” The accusations come amid debates over how strictly to enforce export controls on advanced AI chips, a policy aimed at curbing China’s AI development. Distillation is a common training method that AI labs use on their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions, but competitors can use it to essentially copy the homework…
