Anthropic Said DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax Used Fraudulent Accounts and Proxies to Illicitly Distill Claude Capabilities at Scale
Anthropic said it identified large-scale campaigns that used fraudulent accounts and proxy services to generate high volumes of Claude interactions to extract model capabilities for competitor training ("distillation"). Anthropic attributed the activity to DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax and said it involved millions of exchanges across thousands of accounts, violating its terms and access restrictions. Anthropic described detection measures, account controls, and indicator-sharing in response.
- Date it happened
- 2026-02-23
- Organisation involved
- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Proxy reseller services
- Product, system or model
- Claude, Claude API, Distillation, Model extraction, Account farming, Proxy access infrastructure
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