China’s Moonshot and Other AI Firms Accused of Stealing Anthropic Claude Technology Through ‘Distillation Attacks’

Anthropic accused Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of using “distillation” to extract Claude’s software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities from its outputs. Such practices could circumvent the high cost of training models and have renewed scrutiny in the U.S. Congress over the national security risks of giving Chinese companies access to advanced AI models.

Anthropic recently told the U.S. Senate that Qwen used nearly 25,000 accounts to interact with Claude 28.8 million times, making it the largest distillation attack the company has detected to date. Following the disclosure, Alibaba reportedly instructed employees to uninstall all Claude products. The incident could also spur bipartisan efforts in the United States to consider restrictions on foreign access to AI models.

Model distillation can be a legitimate technique in which a more powerful model is queried at scale and its outputs are collected to train a smaller model to replicate its reasoning and coding capabilities. Anthropic, however, accused DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot AI of circumventing Claude's terms of service and regional restrictions. The case touches on U.S.-China AI competition, intellectual property and model security, and could also result in existing safeguards being removed.

On Feb. 23, 2026, Anthropic released an investigation alleging that the three labs used about 24,000 noncompliant accounts to interact with Claude more than 16 million times. MiniMax accounted for more than 13 million interactions, Moonshot AI more than 3.4 million and DeepSeek more than 150,000. Anthropic did not disclose any financial losses. It said it had strengthened account verification and detection systems and shared attack indicators with industry peers and cloud providers.