Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax of Claude distillation theft

Anthropic reported that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax conducted industrial-scale distillation attacks on Claude, generating over 16 million exchanges via 24,000 fraudulent accounts using proxy networks to extract agentic reasoning, tool use and coding capabilities. Attribution relied on IP correlations, metadata and infrastructure indicators. The event matters because it exposes vulnerabilities in frontier model scaling and prompts strengthened access controls and export-control scrutiny, as the campaigns targeted capabilities protected under US restrictions.