(Bloomberg) -- Anthropic PBC accused China's artificial intelligence champion Moonshot AI of covertly routing thousands of user requests to the US firm's Claude models and passing off the responses as its own in a bid to gain an edge in the AI race.
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Moonshot diverted queries to chatbots from Anthropic, without letting users know, rather than processing them through its Kimi model, according to a report Anthropic published Thursday. In one instance, Anthropic said it spotted nearly 300,000 customer requests that Moonshot sent primarily to Anthropic's Opus AI model. Since Anthropic does not allow its technology to be accessed from inside China, Moonshot used 5,380 fraudulent accounts, most of which appeared to be located in Singapore and Japan, according to the report.Anthropic determined Moonshot's activity was part of a process known as distillation, in which a developer uses data from a more powerful AI model to improve a less powerful system. In this case, Anthropic said it believes the responses Moonshot received from Anthropic's systems were then used to train Moonshot's own software. DeepSeek and Xiaomi Corp. engaged in similar practices, Anthropic said.Representatives for Moonshot, DeepSeek and Xiaomi did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside normal business hours. The Chinese Commerce Ministry recently said there is "no factual or legal basis" for accusations of industrial-scale distillation of US models by Chinese AI companies, following accusations from US security agencies. It also threatened to take countermeasures if the US "takes action to contain and suppress" Chinese AI companies.
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