Anthropic · DeepSeek · Alibaba · Claude · China · CNBC Technology
Anthropic said it detected and disrupted unauthorized large-scale efforts by China-based AI labs including Alibaba
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The U.S. AI company said in a threat intelligence report released Thursday that the firms were involved in what it described as "illicit distillation," a process in which outputs from a more capable AI model are used to train another model and replicate some of its capabilities without authorization.
Key facts
- In one 10-day period, Moonshot relayed nearly 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic, the vast majority of which were routed to Claude Opus models
- The activity peaked at nearly 3 million exchanges per day from more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts, according to the report
- The report, which named several other major Chinese AI companies, covers activity the company said it disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven areas, including cyber operations
- The Alibaba operation was the largest distillation campaign Anthropic said it has measured, involving more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July
Summary
Anthropic said it detected and disrupted unauthorized large-scale efforts by China-based AI labs including Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek to train their models using Claude. The U.S. Anthropic said operators affiliated with Alibaba used Claude outputs to help train its Qwen models, while Moonshot routed some Kimi user requests to Claude and used some of the resulting exchanges to train its own models. The Alibaba operation was the largest distillation campaign Anthropic said it has measured, involving more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July. The activity peaked at nearly 3 million exchanges per day from more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts, according to the report.