Anthropic just dropped evidence that DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax were mass-distilling Claude. 24K fake accounts, 16M+ exchanges.

Anthropic dropped a pretty detailed report — three Chinese AI labs were systematically extracting Claude's capabilities through fake accounts at massive scale. DeepSeek had Claude explain its own reasoning step by step, then used that as training data. They also made it answer politically sensitive questions about Chinese dissidents — basically building censorship training data. MiniMax ran 13M+ exchanges and when Anthropic released a new Claude model mid-campaign, they pivoted within 24 hours. The practical problem: safety doesn't survive the copy. Anthropic said it directly — distilled models probably don't keep the original safety training. Routine questions, same answer. Edge cases — medical, legal, anything nuanced — the copy just plows through with confidence because the caution got lost in extraction. The counterintuitive part though: this makes disagreement between models more valuable. If two models that might share distilled stuff still give you different answers, at least one is actually thinking independently. Post-distillation, agreement means less. Disagreement means more. Anyone else already comparing outputs across models?