OpenAI and Anthropic have publicly warned that Chinese AI labs are using tens of thousands of fake accounts to copy their models through a process called distillation. Anthropic disclosed that operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab ran the largest distillation campaign ever measured, generating more than 28.8 million interactions with its Claude system between April 22 and June 5, 2026, using roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. In February 2026, Anthropic identified a separate wave involving around 24,000 fake accounts that produced 16 million Claude interactions, attributed to operators connected to DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. OpenAI sent a memo to Congress in February 2026 accusing DeepSeek of systematic distillation of its models. The Chinese labs reportedly bypass access restrictions by routing through proxy services. In April 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google formed the Frontier Model Forum to share intelligence and coordinate defenses against adversarial distillation campaigns. The article notes that US policymakers are already weighing additional export controls on AI technologies, and any new restrictions could affect decentralized AI projects and crypto projects dependent on affordable access to compute and model infrastructure.