Top AI firm Anthropic alleges that three China-based AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—used approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to generate over 16 million exchanges with its Claude chatbot. This coordinated "distillation" campaign, spanning weeks to months, aimed to extract high-value model outputs, potentially bypassing U.S. export controls by targeting the reinforcement learning process rather than direct access to advanced chips or model weights. Anthropic warns that such distilled models may lack safety guardrails, enabling authoritarian governments to deploy AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation, and mass surveillance. The company has shared its findings with U.S. government entities and industry partners, highlighting distillation as a growing flashpoint in the U.S.-China AI race.