Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude

Source: Slashdot

Overview

U.S. artificial‑intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up.

The three companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic’s system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday.

Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI’s products. Anthropic said distillation has legitimate uses—companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example—but it can also be used to build competitive products “in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost.”

The scale of the different companies’ distillation activity varied:

• DeepSeek: 150 000 interactions with Claude
• Moonshot AI: more than 3.4 million interactions
• MiniMax: more than 13 million interactions

Anthropic highlighted these figures to illustrate the extent of data siphoning from its Claude model.