Anthropic released a threat intelligence report stating that between December 2025 and August 2026, the company detected and blocked multiple large-scale abnormal calls targeting Claude, involving Chinese AI companies such as Alibaba, Moon's Dark Side, and DeepSeek. The report classified these incidents as unauthorized model distillation, which refers to using the output of a more powerful model to train another model.
Alibaba is accused of having the largest scale of...
According to Anthropic, the entity associated with Alibaba once used Claude to output a series of models called "Tongyi Qianwen" Qwen. This is also considered the largest distillation operation detected by the company to date.
According to the report, this activity occurred from May to July, involving over 151 million interactions with Claude in total, with a peak of nearly 3 million interactions per day. These requests are said to have come from more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts. Anthropic also stated that the same entity used Claude for reinforcement learning and model architecture research as well.
The dark side of the moon is said to have forwarded a request for Kimi.
Anthropic Also mentioned Beijing. AI The dark side of the company. According to the report, the 'dark side of the moon' once forwarded some user requests originally intended for Kimi to Claude, and then displayed the responses from Claude to the users, without the users knowing that the actual responses came from Anthropic.
The report states that within a 10-day period, the 'Dark Side of the Moon' forwarded nearly 300,000 customer requests to Anthropic, with the vast majority of these requests being routed to the Claude Opus model. These requests were initiated from 5,380 accounts identified as fraudulent, and most of these related accounts were located in Singapore and Japan.
Anthropic further stated that the 'Dark Side of the Moon' has preserved at least some of the conversation records and extracted the reasoning text from Claude to use as training data for its own model. During the period from May to July, there were over 23 million interactions attributed to the 'Dark Side of the Moon'.
DeepSeek is also included in the report.
According to Anthropic, DeepSeek also adopted a similar approach to the "dark side of the moon," transferring some interactions to Claude without notifying the users. The company stated that within just 14 days of July 2026, they observed over 12 million distillation attacks that could be attributed to DeepSeek.
Anthropic also indicates that some requests forwarded to Claude contain sensitive information from individual users, large multinational corporations, and entities associated with countries. The report suggests that such practices may be inconsistent with privacy laws and the service terms of the relevant companies.
Additional information:This report covers various types of abusive behaviors that Anthropic interrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, including not only model distillation but also cyber operations, influence operations, monitoring, fraud, biological abuse, and conventional weapons development. As of the time of publication on CNBC, Alibaba, Dark Side of the Moon, DeepSeek, Xiaomi, and Anthropic have not immediately responded to requests for comments.
