Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks

Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks Ravie LakshmananSep 11, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Cybercrime Anthropic on Thursday said it identified and disrupted industrial-scale illicit distillation attacks against Claude from seven labs based in China, including Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai (aka Zhipu), and MiniMax. Knowledge distillation by itself is a legitimate training method. It refers to a machine learning technique where a large, powerful AI model assumes the role of a "teacher" to train a smaller, less-capable or faster "student" model to copy its capabilities. Illicit distillation, on the other hand, is an industrial-scale campaign that covertly extracts a model's capabilities and replicates them in another model without authorization, typically by making use of networks of fake…