Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, accused three of China’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies of creating more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts to tap into its system and train their own models.
The three companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—allegedly used those accounts to send more than 16 million prompts to Claude, siphoning off output to refine their own products, Anthropic said in a Feb. 23 blog post.
“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” the San Francisco-based company said.
The tactic, known as “distillation,” involves training a smaller, less powerful “student” model on the outputs, behavior, and knowledge of a much larger, more advanced “teacher” model. This allows the student system to imitate the teacher’s capabilities without the time and money required to develop them independently….
Anthropic Accuses DeepSeek, Other China-Based AI Firms of Free-Riding
