Elon Musk on Monday lashed out at Anthropic after the Dario Amodei-led company accused Chinese AI companies of pulling millions of answers from Claude to train their own models.
In a post on X, Musk accused Anthropic of stealing data to train its AI model Claude, saying that the startup had to pay billions of dollars in settlement for data theft.
“Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact,” Musk said in the post.
The xAI CEO attached screenshots of ‘X Community Notes’ to back his claim, which says that Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit over the creation of Claude AI and that the company “also trains using stolen data”.
What did Anthropic say?
Anthropic, which is creating ripples across the world with its Claude Code AI model, accused three Chinese companies of using the chatbot to improperly obtain capabilities to improve their own models.
In a blog post on Monday, the company said DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax created more than 16 million interactions with Claude using roughly 24,000 fake accounts.
“We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax,” Anthropic said.
“These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models,” it added.
They used a technique called “distillation,” which involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one, Anthropic noted.
“Distillation can be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers. But foreign labs that illicitly distill American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems,” it said.
Anthropic described the window to act on these moves as “narrow”.
“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication. The window to act is narrow, and the threat extends beyond any single company or region.”
Anthropic faces backlash online
Not only Elon Musk, netizens on the internet lashed out at Anthropic for its alleged hypocrisy. Netizens accused Anthropic of training its Claude AI model with the open internet.
“You trained on the open internet and then call it “distillation attacks” when others learn from you. Labs that like to preach “open research” suddenly crying about open access. this is what happens when intelligence sits behind a centralized api with subsidized tokens,” wrote Tory Green, co-founder of AI infrastructure firm IO.Net.
Another asked why Anthropic was calling the action illegal and unethical when they themselves have done the same.
“When you guys train your model by bombarding others for free of cost, it’s fine. But if others are training by paying your model, it’s illegal? Unethical?”
“It is deeply ironic for AI labs to object to others distilling their models via public APIs. Since that is closely analogous how the models are pretrained from data sets that are often under copyright. “I can use others’ data without permission; no one can use mine without permission,”” a third user added.