Anthropic has accused three prominent Chinese artificial intelligence firms of using its Claude chatbot on a massive scale to secretly train rival models—an unexpected development in a yearslong global debate over where fraud ends and industry standard practice begins.
In a blog post on Monday, San Francisco–based Anthropic alleged that Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax violated corporate law by interacting with Claude, its market-reshaping vibe-coding tool. “We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models,” the company said. “These labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions.”
