US AI giant accuses Chinese rivals of mass data theft

Anthropic says three Chinese firms used distillation' technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI leveled similar charges last month.

Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as distillation" - using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.