Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks — SkimNews
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- Anthropic identified and disrupted seven illicit distillation campaigns from China-based AI labs between March and July 2026, involving over 187 million unauthorized exchanges with Claude
- Alibaba-affiliated operators conducted the largest attack (GTG-16005), harvesting 151 million CoT reasoning transcripts from Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 via 3,500+ fraudulent accounts, peaking at 3 million daily requests
- Moonshot AI rerouted nearly 300,000 customer queries to Claude over 10 days using a proxy network of 5,380 fake accounts, displaying Claude’s responses to users while secretly capturing data to train its Kimi model
- DeepSeek used the same method as Moonshot, relaying more than 12.1 million user exchanges to Claude over 14 days in July 2026 without user knowledge to extract chain-of-thought reasoning
- Zhipu (Z.ai) rotated through 273 fraudulent accounts to replay Claude’s reasoning traces and train its models, while Xiaomi fed MiMo user conversations into Claude via OpenClaw and OpenCode harnesses to enrich training data
- SenseTime purchased harvested user-Claude exchange transcripts from third-party data vendors, contributing to a secondary market fueled by proxy services that record and sell interactions without consent
- Anthropic updated Claude to summarize internal reasoning before responding and introduced 'preserved thinking' in Fable 5.1 to encrypt pre-response context, countering prompt manipulation used in distillation attacks
Why it matters: Chinese AI labs gained accelerated development advantages by stealing high-value reasoning data from U.S. frontier models, undermining Western IP protections and increasing the cost and complexity of securing advanced AI systems. The scale of data theft—over 150 million exchanges in one case—represents a material transfer of capability that narrows the global AI lead.
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