Anthropic PBC’s latest complaint against three Chinese labs is a warning sign for Silicon Valley: Don’t expect to earn too much from the competitive edge your model gives you. Companies from the developing world will line up to swim across your moat, if they can — and neither the US government nor your lawyers will be able to help you. As the music industry and Big Pharma could tell them, nobody will eliminate your rivals, you have to accommodate them.

The company says it has pretty solid evidence that DeepSeek, MiniMax Group Inc. and Moonshot ran “industrial-scale campaigns” to “illicitly extract” the capabilities of its own model, Claude. That involved over 24,000 accounts that Anthropic described as fraudulent, and 16 million exchanges that were “in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions.”

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