Beijing: 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 stated at a regular news conference that Beijing "advocates AI for good" and firmly opposes any attempts to discredit China by misrepresenting facts.

According to Anadolu Agency, 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 technique where 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.