Anthropic's DoD Meeting and Chinese AI Labs Distilling Claude

DoD Meeting: Policy Concessions and Red Lines

Anthropic CEO is scheduled to meet with the US Secretary of Defense. A senior DoD official told Axios this is not a casual introductory chat, describing the vibe as a "shape up or ship out" kind of situation. This follows revelations from January that Claude was used to plan an operation in Venezuela, despite Anthropic's stated policy against military use.

Anthropic appears willing to make concessions and loosen usage policies, but is refusing to budge on two specific areas: mass surveillance of US citizens and the development of autonomous lethal weapons that can fire without human intervention.

Chinese AI Labs Caught Distilling Claude

Anthropic announced they caught at least three Chinese AI companies engaging in massive model distillation, which violates their terms of service. The companies and their request volumes:

• DeepSeek: Approximately 150,000 requests
• Moonshot AI (team behind Kimi): 3.4 million requests
• MiniMax: Over 13 million requests

These campaigns used a similar strategy relying on fraudulent accounts and proxy services to access Claude at scale while avoiding detection. The volume, structure, and focus of their prompts showed clear patterns of intentional capability extraction rather than normal usage.

Anthropic identified these labs with high confidence by correlating IP addresses, request metadata, and infrastructure indicators. In some cases, industry partners confirmed seeing the same actors doing the same things on their platforms.

The campaigns specifically targeted Claude's most advanced features, particularly agentic reasoning, tool use, and coding capabilities. Anthropic is now sharing technical findings with other AI labs, cloud providers, and relevant authorities to address the distillation problem.