According to Anthropic, the use of such methods by Chinese companies violates American export restrictions and licensing agreements. Company representatives noted: “Foreign laboratories that illegally distill American models may remove protective mechanisms, transferring the capabilities of the models to their military, intelligence, and surveillance systems.”
Previously, other American companies, such as OpenAI, also pointed out similar practices by DeepSeek; however, Anthropic provided more detailed data.
Operational Methods
According to Anthropic, malicious actors used networks of numerous fake accounts, referred to as "hydra clusters," to distribute traffic through APIs and third-party cloud services.
Requests sent through these accounts had a massive volume, were narrowly targeted, and exhibited high repeatability, which the company believes indicates their use for training models rather than for ordinary users. For example, DeepSeek sent over 150,000 requests aimed at logical reasoning tasks and "safe" rewrites of politically sensitive queries.
Moonshot, the developer of the Kimi model, executed over 3.4 million requests focused on topics of agency thinking, programming, and computer vision. MiniMax, in turn, conducted the largest operation, sending over 13 million requests related to agent programming. After updating the Claude version, the company was able to redirect nearly half of the traffic within 24 hours to "capture" new opportunities.
Countermeasures
In response to these threats, Anthropic announced plans to enhance the protection of its systems to complicate and simplify the detection of such attacks. The company is implementing classifiers and behavior analysis systems to recognize patterns in API traffic, as well as sharing technical indicators with other AI laboratories and strengthening account verification.
Additionally, protective mechanisms are being developed at the product and model levels to minimize the usefulness of outputs for illegal training without degrading the user experience for legitimate customers.
