New Delhi: The global AI industry has been thrown into a storm of accusations and counterclaims after Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, alleged that several Chinese firms had illicitly exploited its model to strengthen their own systems.

In a statement this week, Anthropic claimed that three laboratories -DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax -created approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to interact with Claude. These accounts allegedly generated more than 16 million exchanges, extracting valuable outputs in areas such as coding, reasoning, and tool use. According to Anthropic, the goal was to distill Claude’s capabilities into their own models, a process the company likened to academic cheating.

Distillation, in AI terms, refers to training a smaller or newer model on the outputs of a more advanced one. While this is a common practice internally at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, Anthropic insists that the Chinese labs engaged in industrial-scale campaigns to siphon off Claude’s strengths without authorisation. 

Enter Elon Musk, who seems omnipresent in every major tech debate and rarely misses an opportunity to jump in. Musk fired back at Anthropic with a sharp accusation of his own: “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.” His remarks reframed the controversy, suggesting that Western AI companies themselves have long relied on questionable practices to build their models.

The internet quickly joined the fray, with reactions echoing Musk’s scepticism. Many commentators pointed out the irony of Anthropic accusing others of practices that major AI players, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have themselves been accused of. Others argued that the incident highlights the global AI arms race, where companies are racing to outpace one another, often blurring ethical boundaries in the process.

This clash underscores a deeper tension in the industry that while AI companies demand protection for their proprietary models, they themselves rely heavily on vast datasets, sometimes scraped from the open internet without explicit consent. As AI becomes central to business, governance, and everyday life, questions of fair play, intellectual property, and accountability are becoming unavoidable.

For now, Anthropic’s accusations against DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax, combined with Musk’s omnipresent counterclaims, have ignited a debate that goes beyond corporate rivalry. It raises fundamental questions about how AI should be developed, who owns the knowledge generated by these systems, and whether the industry can establish ethical boundaries in a race that shows no signs of slowing down.