Anthropic Exposes 200M-Exchange Model Distillation Attacks
Anthropic has published a detailed report attributing nearly 200 million adversarial API exchanges to coordinated model distillation campaigns conducted by Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek. Attackers used prompt obfuscation techniques — including fake translation requests — to bypass Claude's summarised-thinking safeguards and extract raw chain-of-thought traces for use as supervised fine-tuning data. One Moonshot AI campaign was assessed as routing requests directly through Chinese military infrastructure, adding a significant geopolitical dimension to what is otherwise an IP-theft threat.