Anthropic slashes Claude token theft by 99% in AI distillation war
anthropic reduced claude reasoning token theft by 90-99% with new defenses, impacting industrial-scale distillation attacks by chinese companies like zhipu and moonshot.
anthropic has successfully defended its claude models against industrial-scale distillation attacks, reducing the volume of extracted reasoning tokens by 90 to 99 percent. the attacks, carried out by networks of hundreds of thousands of fake accounts, were used by companies like zhipu and moonshot to copy claude's capabilities. zhipu allegedly used the stolen capabilities to train its glm-5.3 model, while moonshot secretly routed queries through claude. anthropic's new defenses include restricting access to claude's internal reasoning steps, running a classifier to detect extraction attempts, and automatically banning flagged accounts. tens of thousands of accounts have already been banned.