Detecting and Preventing Distillation Attacks
5 hours ago
- #distillation attacks
- #AI security
- #national security
- Industrial-scale distillation attacks by AI labs (DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax) to extract Claude's capabilities.
- Over 16 million exchanges via 24,000 fraudulent accounts, violating terms of service and regional restrictions.
- Distillation is a legitimate method but used illicitly to acquire capabilities quickly and cheaply.
- Growing intensity and sophistication of these campaigns require coordinated industry and policy action.
- Illicitly distilled models lack safeguards, posing national security risks (e.g., bioweapons, cyber threats).
- Foreign labs can feed unprotected capabilities into military, intelligence, and surveillance systems.
- Distillation attacks undermine US export controls by allowing foreign labs to bypass restrictions.
- DeepSeek targeted reasoning, grading tasks, and censorship-safe alternatives (150,000+ exchanges).
- Moonshot focused on agentic reasoning, coding, and computer vision (3.4M+ exchanges).
- MiniMax aimed at agentic coding and tool use (13M+ exchanges), pivoting quickly to new model releases.
- Labs use proxy services ('hydra clusters') to bypass regional access restrictions.
- Anthropic's response includes detection, intelligence sharing, access controls, and countermeasures.
- No single company can solve this; industry-wide coordination is needed.