Elon Musk is accusing Anthropic of hypocrisy after the company alleged it has been targeted by large-scale distillation attacks designed to copy Claude’s capabilities.
In a reply on X, Musk says Anthropic has engaged in widespread training data theft and paid major settlements.
Musk also calls Anthropic “super smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical.”
“Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at a massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact.”
Last year, news emerged that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle allegations by authors that it took pirated copies of their books to train its AI chatbot.
Musk’s remarks come in response to an Anthropic post alleging sustained, coordinated extraction of Claude through fraudulent accounts tied to multiple Chinese labs.
“We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.”
Anthropic says the activity is targeted capability extraction rather than ordinary customer usage, suggesting the volume and account creation patterns point to deliberate replication efforts.
“Distillation can be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers.
But foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems.”
Anthropic says the attacks are increasing in intensity and sophistication and suggests that mitigating them will require coordinated action across labs, policymakers and the broader AI ecosystem.
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