Anthropic has accused three Chinese artificial intelligence companies of secretly pulling millions of answers from its chatbot, Claude, and using them to train their own systems. In a blog post published Monday, the company said it had found “industrial-scale campaigns” by developers DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. According to Anthropic, the three labs used around 24,000 fake accounts and generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude.

The announcement instantly drew criticism on X. Many users questioned whether Anthropic had the moral ground to complain, given how large AI systems are trained. Tech mogul Elon Musk also commented on the matter, accusing Anthropic of stealing training data at a massive level and saying that the company has yet to pay millions.

The accusations come at a time when the United States is debating how strict it should be about exporting advanced AI chips to China.

Anthropic claims Chinese AI labs are copying Claude

Anthropic claims the Chinese labs used a method known as “model distillation” to copy Claude’s abilities. Distillation is a way for a smaller AI model to learn from the outputs of a larger one. The company warned that the activity goes beyond normal competition. “These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” Anthropic wrote Monday. “The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region. Addressing it will require rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the global AI community.”

In a separate post on X, the company added, “Distillation can be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers. But foreign labs that illicitly distil American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems.”

Anthropic says the issue is not just about business competition. “Anthropic and other US companies build systems that prevent state and non-state actors from using AI to, for example, develop bioweapons or carry out malicious cyber activities,” the company said. “Models built through illicit distillation are unlikely to retain those safeguards, meaning that dangerous capabilities can proliferate with many protections stripped out entirely.”

Elon Musk reacts, Anthropic faces online backlash

Critics called out Anthropic’s Dario Amodei for hypocrisy. “You trained on the open internet and then call it ‘distillation attacks’ when others learn from you,” wrote Tory Green, co-founder of AI infrastructure firm IO.Net. “Labs that like to preach ‘open research’ suddenly crying about open access.”

Elon Musk shared a screenshot of the claims, writing, “Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at a massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact.”

Another X user mocked the company’s position, writing, “Ohhh nooo not my private IP, how dare someone use that to train an AI model, only Anthropic has the right to use everyone else’s IP nooooo, this cannot stand!”

Meanwhile, Anthropic is also facing legal scrutiny over how it trained Claude. In June, Reddit sued Anthropic, accusing the company of scraping more than 100,000 posts and comments from its platform to fine-tune Claude. The lawsuit alleges Anthropic violated Reddit’s user agreement and continued accessing Reddit’s servers more than 100,000 times even after publicly saying it had stopped in July 2024.

Chip exports and the bigger political fight

Last month, the administration of Donald Trump formally allowed US companies like Nvidia to export advanced AI chips, including the H200, to China. Critics argue that easing these export controls could boost China’s computing power at a crucial moment in the global AI race.

Anthropic says the amount of data extraction carried out by DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot “requires access to advanced chips.”

“Distillation attacks therefore reinforce the rationale for export controls: restricted chip access limits both direct model training and the scale of illicit distillation,” the company wrote in a blog post.