The Cyberspace Administration of China is investigating DeepSeek and the Dark Side of the Moon for allegedly leaking data to Claude

According to The Information, citing informed sources, China's National Internet Information Office has launched an investigation into AI companies DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, triggered by Anthropic's allegations that the two companies secretly routed sensitive user data to their servers. Reports indicate that regulators visited the offices of both companies, interviewing executives and employees, focusing on whether sensitive data related to law enforcement, military, and state-owned enterprises has flowed into U.S. servers.

The trigger for this investigation was Anthropic's fourth threat intelligence report released on September 10. This 154-page document accuses seven Chinese labs—Alibaba, Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, Z.ai, MiniMax, SenseTime, and Xiaomi—of engaging in what it calls "illegal distillation," which involves using the outputs of large models to train smaller models. Anthropic states that distillation itself is a legitimate practice, but it opposes its implementation through fraudulent accounts. The National Internet Information Office initially summoned all seven companies named in the report, but later narrowed the investigation to DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Anthropic claims that Moonshot AI routed over 23 million interactions to Claude through 5,380 fraudulent accounts, while DeepSeek generated over 12.1 million interactions within a 14-day window in July.

The timing of the investigation is quite delicate for both companies.