AI company Anthropic accuses Chinese rival of cheating

The AI company Anthropic accuses its Chinese rival of secretly redirecting user queries to it instead of answering them with its own software.

As a result, some data from government agencies in China and Russia also ended up in the U.S. company's systems, Anthropic wrote in a detailed report on attempts at unauthorized use.

For example, someone uploaded surveillance camera footage -- including footage from areas near Chinese military bases -- with the aim of analyzing the behavior of a specific person in the videos. The user assumed that the request would be carried out by Kimi, a Chinese AI software program developed by Moonshot. However, according to the report, Kimi had Anthropic's Claude handle the task instead.

Anthropic wrote that, in just ten days, Kimi had Claude respond to nearly 300,000 customer inquiries. A network of 5,380 fake accounts was used for this purpose.

Russian military also affected

According to Anthropic, the even better-known Chinese AI DeepSeek also drew attention with such tricks. Among other things, this led to requests containing data from an agency affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Defense being redirected to the U.S. company. The data also included valid login credentials for a Russian government database.

A Hot Topic for Chinese AI Developers

The allegations could cast a shadow on the reputation of China's AI industry. Since early last year, low-cost AI models -- first from DeepSeek and then from Moonshot -- have repeatedly caused turmoil on the stock market. At times, investors doubted the business prospects of American AI labs such as Anthropic and ChatGPT developer OpenAI, as it appeared that high-performance artificial intelligence could be trained with significantly less effort.

Meanwhile, the U.S. side accuses Chinese developers of having used American software such as Claude and ChatGPT on a large scale to train their artificial intelligence. According to the report, Kimi alone accessed Anthropic AI 23 million times between May and July using this technique, known in the industry as "distillation."