Anthropic Accuses DeepSeek of Distillation Attacks on Claude

Date: February 23, 2026
Source: Anthropic Blog

Anthropic published a detailed post revealing what it calls an Anthropic distillation attack at industrial scale, accusing three Chinese AI labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI/Kimi, and MiniMax) of systematically extracting Claude’s capabilities. According to Anthropic, the labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude to train and improve their own models.

The post describes the detection methodology, the countermeasures Anthropic has deployed, and the broader policy implications. This comes at a time when DeepSeek is also withholding its latest model from US chipmakers, further deepening the rift between Chinese and Western AI ecosystems. Furthermore, the accusation has generated wide coverage and debate, with some commentators pointing out that the line between “distillation” and “using a competitor’s product for research” is legally and technically contested. This confirms what many in the AI community have ...