How Claude’s capabilities were extracted at scale
Anthropic said the three distillation campaigns followed a similar playbook, where they used fraudulent accounts and proxy services to access Claude at scale while evading detection, and targeting Claude’s agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding capabilities.
The DeepSeek campaign involved over 150,000 exchanges, focused on extracting reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. The activity generated synchronized traffic across accounts, with identical patterns, shared payment methods, and coordinated timing suggested load balancing to increase throughput, improve reliability, and avoid detection.
Moonshot AI’s activity involved over 3.4 million exchanges targeting agentic reasoning and tool use, coding and data analysis, computer-use agent development, and computer vision to reconstruct Claude’s reasoning traces. MiniMax was the largest of the three, involving more than 13 million exchanges, and was squarely targeted at agentic coding and tool use and orchestration. Detected while the campaign was active, Anthropic said MiniMax redirected nearly half of its traffic to Claude’s newly released model within 24 hours.
