China rejects Anthropic’s AI extraction allegations
The operations involved more than 151 million exchanges with Claude by Alibaba alone between May and July, making it the largest distillation campaign Anthropic said it had measured, according to the report. The activity peaked at nearly 3 million exchanges a day and involved more than 3,500 accounts that Anthropic described as fraudulent.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Beijing “advocates AI for good” and accused Anthropic of “distorting facts”. The comments came a day after Anthropic released a threat intelligence report alleging that several China-based AI companies had conducted what it called “illicit distillation” campaigns against Claude. The company said Alibaba used Claude’s outputs to train its Qwen models and also used the model for wider AI research, including reinforcement learning and model architecture work.
China has firmly rejected accusations by US artificial intelligence company Anthropic that Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI, carried out large-scale efforts to extract responses from its Claude models and use them to train their own systems. Distillation is a common AI training technique in which a less powerful model learns from the outputs of a more capable model. Anthropic alleged that Chinese AI labs went further by using networks of accounts to systematically send prompts to Claude, collect its responses and use those exchanges to improve their own models.
The company said Moonshot relayed nearly 300,000 requests through 5,380 accounts in 10 days and more than 23 million exchanges between May and July. DeepSeek was accused of similar tactics, with Anthropic reporting more than 12 million distillation attacks over 14 days in July. Anthropic also accused Beijing-based Moonshot AI of secretly routing Kimi users’ requests to Claude and using some exchanges to train its models. Xiaomi was also named in the report.