Anthropic claims Chinese AI firms secretly use Claude. Is it true?
Por Chong Ming Lee — South China Morning Post – News feed
Advertisement Artificial intelligence Tech Tech War Anthropic claims Chinese AI firms secretly use Claude. Is it true?
If the claims are true, Beijing’s main concern would not be intellectual property theft or model copying, but data security, says one analyst
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Chong Ming Lee Published: 9:30pm, 9 Oct 2026
Did Chinese AI companies secretly tap US models to close the technology gap? That is the central question hanging over China’s tech sector following a wave of allegations from Washington and American AI lab Anthropic.
According to a joint advisory by the National Security Agency, FBI, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency last month, Chinese AI developers have been systematically extracting capabilities from US frontier models to reduce their own computing, electricity and research costs.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent similarly warned in July that Chinese firms were engaged in large-scale “distillation”.
Specifically, Anthropic claimed Chinese AI developers used fraudulent accounts and proxy networks to siphon reasoning data from its flagship model, Claude – and in some cases even used the US model as a covert back end for their own apps.
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