Anthropic Said DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax Used Fraudulent Accounts and Proxies to Illicitly Distill Claude Capabilities at Scale

Anthropic said it identified large-scale campaigns that used fraudulent accounts and proxy services to generate high volumes of Claude interactions to extract model capabilities for competitor training ("distillation"). Anthropic attributed the activity to DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax and said it involved millions of exchanges across thousands of accounts, violating its terms and access restrictions. Anthropic described detection measures, account controls, and indicator-sharing in response.

What this means for youAnthropic says several Chinese AI companies used fake accounts and proxy services to copy Claude's abilities, showing that AI services can be harvested by rivals. Businesses that rely on AI tools may want to ask providers how they detect and block this kind of abuse. Governments may need clearer rules on copying AI models.