Beijing rejects 'distorting facts' after Anthropic claims Chinese AI labs engaged in distillation

Beijing on Friday rejected what it called "distorting facts" after AI firm Anthropic accused Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek, Xiaomi, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of distorting its models' capabilities.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a regular news conference on Friday that Beijing "advocates AI for good."

"We firmly oppose attempts to throw mud at China by distorting facts," she said.

Anthropic published a report titled Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI: September 2026 on Thursday.

In the report, the company accused Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories, including Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, of executing industrial-scale distillation attacks.

Distillation is a common technique through which a less powerful AI system learns from responses generated by a more advanced model.

These firms allegedly rerouted inbound user prompts to Claude to harvest its chain-of-thought reasoning and train their own architectures.

Anthropic noted that these unauthorized pass-throughs inadvertently exposed sensitive third-party data, including internal closed-circuit television surveillance footage from Chengdu.