Anthropic is accusing three Chinese AI companies of setting up more than 24,000 fake accounts with its Claude AI model to improve their own models. The labs — DeepSeek , Moonshot AI , and MiniMax — allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through those accounts using a technique called “distillation.” Anthropic said the labs “targeted Claude’s most differentiated capabilities: agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding.” The accusations come amid debates over how strictly to enforce export controls on advanced AI chips, a policy aimed at curbing China’s AI development.  Distillation is a common training method that AI labs use on their own models to create smaller, cheaper versions, but competitors can use it to essentially copy the homework of other labs.…