China’s AI Theft Tactics Exposed | Tech News

0:00On September 10th, yo, so... Shekit, there's this new report from Anthropic dropping some serious intel about AI. They're saying that companies based in China have been hitting their advanced AI models with these distillation attacks. Basically, they're trying to steal the thinking process of these powerful AI systems to train their own smaller models. This has been wrapping up lately, especially as the AI game gets more competitive. These attacks are getting pretty slick. The report highlights how these unauthorized labs are finding ways around Anthropic security to grab the core capabilities of their frontier models. By Claude, we're talking about stuff like agentic abilities, how the AI uses tools, its coding skills, data analysis, and even its logical reasoning. They're not just getting surface level answers. They're digging for the how and why. Normally, Anthropic keeps the AI's internal thought process locked down, giving users just a summary. But these attackers figured out how to trick the model into spilling its guts.

1:02One clever move involved posing as a translator, asking the AI to translate its working memory into Japanese. It's like finding a backdoor by asking for something seemingly innocent. The report points Dalai Baba as a major player in this, calling it the biggest wholesale distillation effort they've ever seen. From May to July of 2026, they logged over 151 million exchanges linked to this campaign, with some days hitting nearly. Three million. They believe it was all one big operation to build training data for Alibaba's Quinn models. Then there's Moonshot AI, the folks behind Kimi. Anthropics reports suggest their requests might have been directly linked to the Chinese military. One wild example involved asking Claw to analyze surveillance footage to see if someone was acting abnormally. Over a 10-day stretch, nearly 300,000 requests went through them, mostly targeting Anthropics top tier Opus model. Tech news today, powered by AI bringing you what matters in tech. I'm Cory with the story.