Says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax are using 'distillation' to gin up their own models

Having built a business by remixing content created by others, Anthropic worries that Chinese AI labs are stealing its data.

The US-based maker of Claude models on Monday accused China-based DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of conducting "industrial-scale campaigns" to siphon knowledge from its models through a technique known as "distillation."

Model distillation is a deep learning technique in which a large "teacher" model can be made to transfer its learned patterns to a smaller "student" model. It's a form of data compression that ideally produces a smaller, more efficient model without significant performance loss. Useful for explainable AI – shining a light into black box algorithms – it's also a handy way to copy a model.

Anthropic, like its leading rivals, has been sued for alleged copyright infringement or unauthorized web scraping several times. Claims include: Bartz v. Anthropic; Carreyrou v. Anthropic; Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic; MacKinnon v. Anthropic (Canada); and Reddit, Inc. v. Anthropic.

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