Major US AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have accused Chinese rivals of using a technique called "distillation" to replicate their chatbots. Anthropic disclosed in a February 23, 2026, blog post that three Chinese labs—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—created roughly 24,000 fake accounts to conduct over 16 million conversations with Claude, harvesting its responses. OpenAI told the House Select Committee on China in early February 2026 that DeepSeek used distillation to develop its R1 model. New accusations in June 2026 targeted Alibaba, describing an operation involving approximately 28.8 million interactions with AI models. In response, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google began sharing threat intelligence starting in April 2026. A White House memo dated April 23, 2026, confirmed the administration views these distillation campaigns as "industrial-scale" operations by Chinese companies.