tech
February 23, 2026
Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI
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TL;DR
- Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot of misusing its Claude AI model.
- The alleged misuse involved "industrial-scale campaigns" with approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts and over 16 million exchanges.
- Companies are accused of "distilling" Claude to improve their own AI products, a method that can be used illicitly to acquire advanced capabilities cheaply.
- Anthropic warns that distilled models may lack safeguards and could be used by authoritarian governments for cyber operations, disinformation, and surveillance.
- DeepSeek is specifically accused of targeting Claude's reasoning capabilities and generating "censorship-safe alternatives" to politically sensitive questions.
- OpenAI has also accused DeepSeek of "free-riding" on U.S. AI labs' capabilities.
- Anthropic calls for industry collaboration, cloud provider involvement, and lawmaker action to address distillation, suggesting restricted chip access could limit illicit training.
- Moonshot and MiniMax had over 3.4 million and 13 million exchanges with Claude, respectively.
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