SAN FRANCISCO — Feb 24, 2026 — In a sweeping disclosure that has rattled the AI sector, Anthropic announced today it has disrupted "industrial-scale" campaigns by three Chinese AI laboratories to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude models. The firm identified DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax as the primary actors behind an operation involving 16 million exchanges and 24,000 fraudulent accounts.
By utilizing "distillation attacks" a process of training smaller models on the outputs of a superior system, these labs allegedly sought to bypass years of R&D and millions in compute costs to replicate American frontier AI performance.
The Mechanics of a "Distillation Attack"
While "distillation" is a standard industry technique for making models more efficient, Anthropic defines these specific campaigns as illicit "capability extraction." The report notes that MiniMax was the largest contributor, accounting for 13 million exchanges, while Moonshot (3.4M) and DeepSeek (150k) targeted specific reasoning traces.
- The Teacher: A high-performing model like Claude.
- The Student: A smaller, cheaper model owned by a competitor.
- The Theft: By querying Claude with massive, structured datasets, the student model learns to mimic Claude’s advanced reasoning and logic, effectively "stealing" the intellectual property (IP) baked into its weights.
Anthropic noted that the volume and structure of these 16 million prompts were distinct from normal human behavior, reflecting a mechanical effort to drain the model's "know-how."
A New Frontier: National Security & Export Controls
Anthropic’s report elevates the issue from corporate IP theft to a matter of U.S. National Security. The firm argues that distilled models often lack the safety guardrails, such as refusals to help with biological weapons that Anthropic spends significant resources to implement.
Furthermore, these attacks represent a "soft" bypass of current export controls. While the U.S. has restricted the sale of advanced chips (like Nvidia’s H100s) to China, distillation allows these labs to achieve high-tier AI performance using far less compute power than a traditional training run would require.
Defensive Deployment: Detection and Beyond
To counter these threats, Anthropic has deployed a multi-layered security framework designed to flag extraction patterns in real-time.
1. Behavioral Classifiers
New systems now monitor API traffic for "chain-of-thought" elicitation and coordinated account activity. By identifying the specific "statistical signature" of a distillation script, Anthropic can block fraudulent accounts before they harvest significant data.
2. Output Watermarking (The "Radioactive" Defense)
While technical specifics remain closely guarded, industry experts point to "statistical watermarking" as the likely deterrent. By subtly biasing word choices, Anthropic can embed a hidden signal in Claude's output. If this signal appears in a competitor's model, it serves as "radioactive" proof of unauthorized training.
Technical Insight: This "radioactivity" means that any student model trained on the data will inherently possess the same statistical quirks as the teacher, making the theft verifiable in a court of law.
Industry Impact: The "Closed-Loop" Future
The discovery of such a massive campaign suggests that API endpoints are the new "soft underbelly" of the AI industry. We expect to see a rapid shift toward:
- Aggressive Rate Limiting: For users operating in high-risk regions.
- Proof-of-Personhood: Stricter verification for developer accounts to prevent the creation of thousands of "throwaway" profiles.
- Threat Intelligence Sharing: Anthropic is calling for a "unified industry response" similar to traditional cybersecurity information-sharing centers.
Sources & Data Verification
- Attribution: Identity of DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax confirmed via Anthropic Intelligence Report (Feb 23, 2026).
- Metric Validation: 16 million query volume and 24,000 account closures verified through The Hacker News technical briefing.
- Policy Context: Claims regarding U.S. chip export control circumvention cross-referenced with Investing.com / Reuters economic analysis.
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