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Technology · 24 February 2026

Anthropic Says Chinese AI Labs Used 24,000 Fake Accounts to Copy Claude’s Capabilities

Anthropic Says Chinese AI Labs Used 24,000 Fake Accounts to Copy Claude’s Capabilities

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

US AI developer Anthropic has accused three Chinese firms — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax — of using about 24,000 fraudulent accounts to run over 16 million interactions with its Claude chatbot, allegedly to extract and retrain Claude’s abilities in their own models via a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic claims this violated its terms of service and could undermine safety and export controls on AI tech, intensifying US-China tensions in the AI race.

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