Anthropic says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax used 24,000 fake accounts to rip off Claude

Anthropic dropped a bombshell on the artificial intelligence industry Monday, publicly accusing three prominent Chinese AI laboratories — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — of orchestrating coordinated, industrial-scale campaigns to siphon capabilities from its Claude models using tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts.

The San Francisco-based company said the three labs collectively generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fake accounts, all in violation of Anthropic's terms of service and regional access restrictions. The campaigns, Anthropic said, are the most concrete and detailed public evidence to date of a practice that has haunted Silicon Valley for months: foreign competitors systematically using a technique called distillation to leapfrog years of research and billions of dollars in investment.

"These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication," Anthropic wrote in a technical blog post published Monday. "The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single ...