AI behemoths in US accuse Chinese rivals of data theft‘DISTILLATION’: OpenAI this month told US lawmakers that Chinese companies ‘free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs’AFP, SAN FRANCISCOUS artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic PBC said on Monday that it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. Photo: BloombergDistillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models. Anthropic said the Chinese companies achieved their ends through approximately 16 million exchanges with its Claude model and 24,000 fake accounts. Each campaign concentrated heavily on coding, agentic reasoning and tool use — areas in which Claude is considered a leader. Anthropic called for coordinated industry and government responses to address what it said no single company could tackle alone.

Source: Taipei Times February 24, 2026 17:13 UTC