China probes DeepSeek and Moonshot over alleged data leaks to Anthropic

Chinese authorities are reportedly investigating two of the country’s most prominent AI companies, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, over allegations that sensitive Chinese user data was funneled to US servers through Anthropic’s Claude models. The probes follow accusations from Anthropic and US government agencies that paint a picture of industrial-scale intellectual property extraction dressed up as normal API usage. The core allegation is striking in its scope. Anthropic claims the Chinese firms created roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts and conducted more than 16 million exchanges with Claude, effectively reverse-engineering the model’s capabilities in reasoning and coding for a fraction of what it cost to develop them. The scale of the alleged operation DeepSeek alone was linked to over 12 million exchanges in just 14 days during July 2026, with some queries reportedly containing sensitive corporate information. Moonshot AI allegedly routed approximately 300,000 customer requests through 5,380 accounts within a 10-day window in September 2026, on top of more than 23 million exchanges between May and July. MiniMax, another Chinese AI firm caught up in the allegations, reportedly accoun...