Anthropic put out a report on September 10 accusing seven Chinese AI labs of quietly running their traffic through Claude, basically having their own users chat with Claude by proxy so they could scrape the outputs and train on them without anyone knowing. Anthropic says Moonshot alone routed more than 23 million exchanges through over five thousand fake accounts, and DeepSeek pushed through 12 million more in a two week stretch back in July.
China’s internet regulator did not shrug this off. The Cyberspace Administration called in representatives from all seven companies named in that report, then narrowed things down to DeepSeek and Moonshot specifically. Now it is an actual investigation, and the questions being asked are the kind that matter. Did users know their prompts might leave Chinese servers entirely. Did sensitive information, maybe even government or corporate data, end up sitting on machines in another country.
What gets me is the timing. This is landing right as DeepSeek is set to share a stage with Anthropic’s own CEO at the UN, and just before Trump and Xi are supposed to sit down and talk AI face to face. You could not script a more awkward backdrop if you tried.
I do not think this is really about DeepSeek or Moonshot being uniquely bad actors here. It is what happens when every lab on earth is racing to train the next model and the fastest shortcut on the table is quietly borrowing someone else’s smarter outputs. Anthropic caught it because they were watching closely, and that is a good sign in itself. That is the system working the way it is supposed to.
China running its own investigation instead of waving it off is also, honestly, a decent sign. Nobody wants a world where borrowing training data quietly becomes the norm and nobody ever checks. However this shakes out, it pushes every lab, American or Chinese, toward being more upfront about where their training data actually comes from. That is a good habit for the whole industry to pick up.
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Sources:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-probes-deepseek-moonshot-potential-data-leaks-anthropic
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-22/china-probes-deepseek-moonshot-over-data-security-information
https://decrypt.co/379120/china-probes-deepseek-moonshot-data-leaks-anthropic-claude
Repost this. Thanks.