Distillation

Anthropic Names Seven Chinese Labs for "Illicit Distillation" | The Claim That Kimi Requests Were Quietly Relayed to Claude, and What Companies Should Check Today

On September 10, 2026, Anthropic named Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Zhipu, Xiaomi, MiniMax and SenseTime in a report on "illicit distillation" of Claude. Its most striking claim: Moonshot silently forwarded users' Kimi requests to Claude and displayed Claude's answers as Kimi's. Two days earlier, the NSA, CISA and FBI had named six companies in a joint advisory; China's foreign ministry called the accusations a smear, and Moonshot had already denied distillation in July. This article lays out each side from primary sources, explains what distillation is, why "not knowing which model answered" is the real problem for companies, and how to check where your data actually went.