China rejects Anthropic's 'illicit distillation' claim over Claude

China rejected US AI company Anthropic's "illicit distillation" allegations that Chinese Al labs, including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot Al, made large-scale efforts to extract responses from its Claude models and use them to train their own systems. "We firmly oppose attempts to throw mud at China by distorting facts," Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said.