Anthropic said it detected and disrupted unauthorized large-scale efforts by China-based AI labs including Alibaba, Moonshot and DeepSeek to train their models using Claude.
The U.S. AI company said in a threat intelligence report released Thursday that the firms were involved in what it described as "illicit distillation," a process in which outputs from a more capable AI model are used to train another model and replicate some of its capabilities without authorization.
"Some of these exchanges included sensitive information, including from individual users, major multinational companies, and state-affiliated actors ... These practices are likely inconsistent with privacy laws and the labs' own terms of service," according to the report.
Anthropic said operators affiliated with Alibaba used Claude outputs to help train its Qwen models, while Moonshot routed some Kimi user requests to Claude and used some of the resulting exchanges to train its own models.
The Alibaba operation was the largest distillation campaign Anthropic said it has measured, involving more than 151 million exchanges with Claude between May and July.