When the Trump administration’s draft chip export rules emerged on March 5, the stated rationale was straightforward: restrict hardware access to limit Chinese AI capability gains. Anthropic’s February 24 blog post is one of the clearest documented accounts of how those gains are being pursued — not through chip acquisition, but through systematic extraction of American frontier model outputs.
Anthropic says it identified industrial-scale campaigns by three Chinese AI laboratories — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax — to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities through a technique called knowledge distillation, which involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one. According to Anthropic’s analysis, the three labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, in violation of its terms of service and regional access restrictions. Anthropic says MiniMax drove the most traffic at over 13 million exchanges. Anthropic attributed each campaign to a specific lab through IP address correlation, request metadata, and infrastructure indicators. These figures and the lab identifications are Anthropic’s claims, based on its own described methodology, and have not been independently verified by third parties.
The policy connection Anthropic drew was explicit. TechCrunch reported that Anthropic argued chip access restrictions reduce both direct model training capacity and the scale of illicit distillation — framing hardware export controls as a defense against capability extraction, not just compute competition. Whether Anthropic’s findings directly informed the Commerce Department’s draft rules is not confirmed.
The distinction matters: the draft chip rules address hardware access. The distillation campaigns Anthropic described required no advanced chips — only API access and fraudulent accounts. Both vectors are active. The March 5 draft framework addresses one of them.
Related: Full coverage of the draft chip export framework, including the investment thresholds and Commerce Department confirmation, on the Regulation pillar.