Earlier this month, Google publicly griped that “commercially motivated” actors were trying to clone its Gemini AI through agents that queried the chatbot up to 100,000 times to “extract” the underlying model. The hypocrisy of Google’s accusations was palpable. For years, the search giant has relied on indiscriminately scraping the internet for content to train its AI models, without compensating copyright holders — and racking up lawsuits as a result. Now Anthropic has entered the fray. Unlike Google, the company behind chatbot Claude was willing to point fingers, accusing Chinese AI firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of “distilling” its AI model. The company claimed in a new blog post that the accused firms created more than 24,000 fake accounts that queried Claude 16 million times, a “violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions.” Distillation is essentially when a small “student” model is trained to replicate the performance of a much larger “teacher” model — a convoluted term essentially denoting the act of copying someone’s homework without express permission. Even ChatGPT maker OpenAI has accused DeepSeek of distilling its AI models in a statement earlier this month, highlighting a broader backlash to Chinese entities reverse-engineering extremely costly AI…