Anthropic discloses distillation attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax and explains defensive measures
Detecting and preventing distillation attacks
In an article published by Anthropic on February 23, 2026, it alleges that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax conducted over 16 million interactions with Claude using approximately 24,000 accounts to extract model capabilities. The company reports MiniMax with over 13 million interactions, Moonshot with over 3.4 million, and DeepSeek with over 150,000. These attributions and statistics come from Anthropic and do not by themselves prove other allegations about sensitive Chinese material. The article also describes its detection, access control, and industry collaboration measures.
Anthropic publicly named three labs' industrial distillation activities for the first time, providing account scale, target capabilities, and detection methods, serving as primary material for observing debates on model capability theft and export controls.