Anthropic AI claims that it has identified ‘industrial-scale distillation attacks’ by Chinese AI company DeepSeek

WASHINGTON: Anthropic AI claims that it has identified “industrial-scale distillation attacks” on its own reasoning models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.

In a post on X, Anthropic shared, “We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models”.

“Distillation can be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers. But foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems”. it wrote further.

“These attacks are growing in intensity and sophistication. Addressing them will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the broader AI community,” the statement concluded.

We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.

These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) February 23, 2026

Anthropic is an artificial intelligence research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. The company focuses on building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems with a strong emphasis on safety.

Anthropic is best known for developing the Claude family of large language models, designed to be helpful, honest, and harmless. Its research centers on “constitutional AI,” a method that guides models using explicit principles rather than relying solely on human feedback. Backed by major investors such as Google and Amazon, Anthropic aims to advance AI technology responsibly while minimizing societal and ethical risks.

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company known for developing powerful open-weight large language models (LLMs) and the DeepSeek chatbot. Founded in 2023, DeepSeek’s models, including DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3, use efficient architectures like mixture-of-experts to deliver high performance at much lower computational cost compared with many Western AI systems.

DeepSeek’s chatbot became one of the most downloaded AI apps in early 2025 and is praised for strong reasoning, long-context understanding, and multilingual capabilities. However, it has also attracted regulatory scrutiny and national security concerns in several countries due to data privacy and training practices.

There has been no official statement released by DeepSeek AI, Moonshot AI and Minimax countering Anthropic’s claims. However, Anthropic’s eyebrow-raising claims do bring the Chinese AI company vehemently under public scrutiny. Currently, no laws in either of the countries govern such activities. (ANI)