By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-02-23 23:15:00
US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illegally extract skills from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI made similar allegations last month.
Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation” – using the results of a more powerful AI system to quickly boost the performance of a less powerful system.
“These campaigns are becoming increasingly intense and sophisticated,” the company said in a statement. “The window of opportunity to act is narrow.”
Distillation is a common practice in AI development and is often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models.
The practice made headlines a year ago when DeepSeek’s release of a low-cost generative AI model performed similarly to ChatGPT and other leading American chatbots, upending assumptions of U.S. dominance in this sensitive sector.
