Science and Technology

A recent report by the U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic accused several leading Chinese AI firms, including Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, of distilling Claude’s capabilities on a large scale. Anthropic said some of these companies went beyond using Claude to generate training data and, without users’ knowledge, in one instance routed at least 300,000 requests from real users through the model over a 10-day period.

The data reportedly sent to Claude included surveillance material submitted by a user Anthropic suspected of being affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army; internal code and valid credentials from engineers at major Chinese state-owned enterprises; information from police case management systems; and details of internal AI projects at Chinese technology companies.

A recent report by the U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic accused several leading Chinese AI firms, including Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, of distilling Claude’s capabilities on a large scale. Anthropic said some of these companies went beyond using Claude to generate training data and, without users’ knowledge, in one instance routed at least 300,000 requests from real users through the model over a 10-day period.

The data reportedly sent to Claude included surveillance material submitted by a user Anthropic suspected of being affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army; internal code and valid credentials from engineers at major Chinese state-owned enterprises; information from police case management systems; and details of internal AI projects at Chinese technology companies.

The leakage of sensitive information will of course alarm Beijing. But compared with one or two pieces of sensitive material reaching the United States, the bigger worry may be that, in the process of distilling the capabilities of the most advanced U.S. models, Chinese AI companies may also be sending large quantities of real Chinese user data to the United States.

AI competition is not just about compute but about data. Today, data available on the open internet is increasingly easy to obtain. What is truly scarce is the high-quality data generated by real tasks: why users turn to AI, what problems they are trying to solve, what background materials they........

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