Anthropic Exposes Industrial-Scale AI Distillation Attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax

Industrial-Scale Distillation Attacks Discovered

On February 24, 2026, Anthropic publicly disclosed that major Chinese AI companies had been conducting large-scale distillation attacks against its Claude models. DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax were identified as the perpetrators.

Scale and Method

The attack involved:

Creation of over 24,000 fraudulent accounts

Generation of more than 16 million exchanges with Claude

Using that conversation data to train and improve their own competing AI models

Why Illicit Distillation Is Dangerous

Anthropic distinguishes between legitimate and illicit distillation. While AI labs legitimately use distillation to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers, foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safety guardrails and feed extracted capabilities into their military, intelligence, and surveillance systems.

Call for Coordinated Action

Anthropic warned that these attacks are growing in both intensity and sophistication, calling for rapid, coordinated action from industry players, policymakers, and the broader AI community to address the threat.

Full details are available in Anthropic's official report: Detecting and Preventing Distillation Attacks.