U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic has accused Chinese AI developers of “engaging in aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities,” and stealing from U.S. AI models.
A September report from Anthropic stated that for two years, companies such as “DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests from U.S. frontier AI models, including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok.”
It also stated that the Chinese government was “likely aware of it.” However, a report in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) has expressed skepticism regarding the claims.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has described it as a “systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities threatening U.S. technological leadership.”
According to Anthropic’s report, Moonshot AI secretly forwards requests to Claude, not Kimi, though users believed it was Kimi. “Over a ten-day period, we’re talking 300,000 customer requests. They used a proxy service network of 5,380 fraudulent accounts in Singapore and Japan,” read an excerpt from the report.
The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a joint advisory to warn US firms about the alleged activities. They called out Chinese AI companies for conducting shady dealings on an industrial scale, using robust operations to steal capabilities from American AI systems.
The government advisory named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI as companies involved in large-scale model distillation campaigns since at least late 2024.
Distillation is a technique in which developers use a more advanced AI model’s outputs to train another system.
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