On February 23, Anthropic published a broadside to confront a threat that requires “rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers, and the global AI community.” Three Chinese AI firms, it said, had been waging “industrial-scale campaigns” to “illicitly extract” proprietary information from Anthropic model Claude “to improve their own models.” Using 24,000 fraudulent customer accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges, these firms appeared to be using a technique called “distillation” to seize “powerful capabilities” from the company’s products “in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, that it would take to develop them independently.”

They were being scraped, in other words, and they weren’t the only ones. Earlier this month, Google shared a report on its own concerns about rising “model extraction attempts,” or “distillation attacks,” carried out by “private sector entities all over the world and researchers seeking to clone proprietary logic.” Around the same time, OpenAI sent a letter to legislators providing an “updated assessment” on the issue, stating it had observed activity “indicative of ongoing attempts by DeepSeek to distill frontier models of OpenAI and other US frontier labs, including through new, obfuscated methods.”

Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI each characterize the problem in slightly different ways. Anthropic, which has positioned itself as the cautious, safety-focused lab, suggests that model scraping could be used to build powerful tools stripped of safeguards meant to “prevent state and non-state actors from using AI to, for example, develop bioweapons or carry out malicious cyber activities” and that “unprotected capabilities” could be used by “authoritarian governments to deploy frontier AI for offensive cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and mass surveillance.” (The company is currently in a rapidly escalating fight with the Trump administration over whether its products can be used for war and surveillance, which has resulted in threats by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to either cancel the company’s contracts or invoke the Defense Production Act to force it to develop a “WarClaude.”) OpenAI’s letter, addressed to a House committee concerned with Chinese AI development, focuses on how distillation might threaten American AI dominance as well as the measures the company is........

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