Key Takeaways
- Anthropic claims Chinese AI companies DeepSeek and Moonshot secretly routed customer requests to Claude.
- Moonshot allegedly sent 300,000 requests to Claude over 10 days.
- Alibaba and other Chinese firms also accused of unauthorized distillation.
Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI model, has accused Chinese AI companies DeepSeek and Moonshot of secretly routing customer requests to its models and presenting the responses as their own.
In a detailed threat intelligence report, Anthropic alleged that Moonshot, the developer of the Kimi models, sent almost 300,000 customer requests to Claude over 10 days, using 5,380 accounts that Anthropic considered fraudulent.
Most of these accounts were based in Singapore and Japan, and the requests were directed to Claude’s Opus models. Anthropic claims Moonshot displayed Claude’s responses to customers as if they were generated by Kimi.
The company also alleges that Moonshot saved some of these exchanges to extract Claude’s reasoning for training its own models, exposing sensitive information to Moonshot customers.
Anthropic observed more than 23 million exchanges attributable to Moonshot between May and July 2026. The report also includes similar claims against DeepSeek, which allegedly silently redirected selected customer requests to Claude without informing the users.
The report states that some of the information passed to Claude included internal documents from a Chinese technology company, credentials from a Russian government database, and data used by engineers working on a Chinese police surveillance system.
Anthropic’s report also accused several other Chinese AI companies, including Alibaba, Z.ai, Xiaomi, and MiniMax, of large-scale unauthorized distillation. Alibaba was identified as the largest campaign, with more than 151 million exchanges observed between May and July 2026.
Anthropic describes these particular campaigns as 'illicit' because they involve the unauthorized use of Claude’s responses to train competing models, a common AI training technique known as distillation.
DeepSeek and Moonshot had not publicly provided detailed responses to the allegations at the time of reporting.
