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Anthropic accuses Chinese AI labs of mining Claude as US debates AI chip exports Rebecca Bellan 11:57 AM PST · February 23, 2026 Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models.
The labs — DeepSeek , Moonshot AI , and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.”
The accusations come amid debates over how strictly to enforce export controls on advanced AI chips, a policy aimed at curbing China’s AI development.
Distillation is a common training method that AI labs use on their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions, but competitors can use it to essentially copy the homework of other labs. OpenAI sent a memo to House lawmakers earlier this month accusing DeepSeek of using distillation to mimic its products.
DeepSeek first made waves a year ago when it released its open source R1 reasoning model that nearly matched American frontier labs in performance at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek is expected to soon release DeepSeek V4, its latest model, which reportedly can outperform Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT in coding.
The scale of each attack differed in scope. Anthropic tracked more than 150,000 exchanges from DeepSeek that seemed aimed at improving foundational logic and alignment, specifically around censorship-safe alternatives to policy-sensitive queries.
Moonshot AI had more than 3.4 million exchanges targeting agentic reasoning and tool use, coding and data analysis, computer-use agent development, and computer vision. Last month, the firm released a new open source model Kimi K2.5 and a coding agent.
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Anthropic says it will continue to invest in defenses that make distillation attacks harder to execute and easier to identify, but is calling on “a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers.”
The distillation attacks come at a time when American chip exports to China are still hotly debated. Last month, the Trump administration formally allowed U.S. companies like Nvidia to export advanced AI chips (like the H200) to China. Critics have argued that this loosening of export controls increases China’s AI computing capacity at a critical time in the global race for AI dominance.
Anthropic says that the scale of extraction DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot performed “requires access to advanced chips.”
“Distillation attacks therefore reinforce the rationale for export controls: restricted chip access limits both direct model training and the scale of illicit distillation,” per Anthropic’s blog .
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