Anthropic disrupts massive distillation attack from Chinese AI labs targeting Claude

Anthropic just revealed that several major Chinese AI labs ran coordinated campaigns to siphon knowledge from Claude, its flagship AI model, using networks of fake accounts and hundreds of millions of carefully crafted queries. The company says it caught and shut down the operations. The company’s September 2026 threat intelligence report details five distinct distillation campaigns that collectively generated nearly 190 million exchanges with Claude between May and July 2026. The biggest offender, according to Anthropic: operators linked to Alibaba. What distillation actually means here Model distillation is a technique where a smaller or less capable AI model learns by studying the outputs of a more powerful one. The Alibaba-linked campaign alone accounted for over 151 million exchanges with Claude during the May-to-July window. Operators systematically queried Claude’s reasoning capabilities and harvested the detailed “reasoning traces” that the model produces when working through complex problems. Those traces were then fed back into rival models, including Alibaba’s Qwen series. Moonshot, the Beijing-based company behind the Kimi AI assistant, routed more than 300,000 customer...