China
4 items across 2 editions · appeared in the last 2 editions in a row. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Sat 12 Sep.
- The Hacker News reports the seven named companies as Alibaba, Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, Zhipu (Z.ai), MiniMax, SenseTime and Xiaomi, with per-campaign figures: GTG-16005 (Alibaba) 151 million exchanges from May to July 2026 across more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts, peaking near 3 million exchanges a day; GTG-16002 (Moonshot) 23 million exchanges across 5,380 fraudulent accounts registered in Singapore and Japan.
- Also listed: GTG-16001 (DeepSeek) 12.1 million exchanges over 14 days in July 2026 via a proxy relay; GTG-16006 (Zhipu) 3.4 million exchanges across 273 accounts from June to July 2026; GTG-16008 (Xiaomi) 400,000 exchanges over 20 days in March–April 2026; GTG-16012 (SenseTime), which bought transcripts from vendors; and GTG-16003 (MiniMax), via a shell-company proxy network.
- Anthropic says it responded by banning reseller accounts and accounts from unsupported regions where users fail to verify identity, by updating Claude to summarise its internal reasoning before responding, and by introducing a "preserved thinking" feature — measures aimed squarely at protecting chain-of-thought traces, which the Alibaba campaign is said to have targeted.
- This extends yesterday's item, which carried only the 151 million figure for Alibaba-linked accounts. Every figure is Anthropic's own account of activity on its own platform; none of the named companies' responses appear in the report, and no independent party has verified the counts.
- TechCrunch reported on 11 September at 12:35 pm PDT that Moonshot AI is "targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year", a doubling of its August run rate. For scale, TechCrunch puts OpenAI's revenue run rate at $40 billion and Anthropic's annualised revenue at $65 billion.
- OpenRouter data cited by TechCrunch shows Moonshot's K3 models generating "as many as 300 billion tokens being generated each day" on that platform, with usage down slightly in recent months.
- The figures matter because Moonshot ships open weights, which carry lower margins than closed models; a $2 billion run rate would be the strongest commercial evidence yet for that business model.
- In the same week Anthropic accused Moonshot of routing "nearly 300,000 requests from Kimi directly to Claude Opus" and collecting "more than 23 million responses". The revenue figures are Moonshot's own, given to investors, and are not independently verified; Moonshot's response to the distillation allegation is not in the piece.
- The cluster Anthropic tracks as GTG-10007 "targeted roughly fifty organizations, spanning education, retail, energy, technology, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, as well as multiple government agencies globally." Automated vulnerability research against network appliances "yielded more than a dozen possible zero day findings in a single month."
- Anthropic identifies two operators as undergraduate students at a university in Hunan province, in its School of Computer & Communication Engineering, one of whom had previously interned at the security firm Sangfor. The operation used agent swarms, with a lead agent decomposing reconnaissance and post-exploitation work across many parallel subagents.
- The significance is the operator profile rather than the target count: this is industrial-scale vulnerability discovery run by students, which is the concrete form of the report's broader claim that "sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers."
- Anthropic describes the zero-day findings as "possible" — the report does not say how many were confirmed, disclosed or exploited, and does not name the affected appliance vendors.
- TechCrunch, reporting figures from Anthropic's 10 September threat report, says accounts linked to Alibaba generated 151 million Claude exchanges between May and July 2026 across about 3,500 accounts, and that Moonshot AI accounted for roughly 300,000 requests over ten days across 5,000 accounts — part of around 200 million exchanges across five campaigns. Extraction techniques included framing requests as translation tasks to surface chain-of-thought reasoning.
- The joint CISA, NSA and FBI bulletin AA26-251A, published 8 September, names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI as conducting "aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale" against Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024, extracting "billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests."
- The agencies' recommended countermeasures are unusually specific, and include monitoring subscription-to-usage ratios and enterprise-scale throughput from new accounts, and subtly altering responses to suspected distillation attempts to reduce the payoff to the attacker.
- The named companies' responses are not documented in the reporting reviewed here. Distillation of a competitor's outputs is a terms-of-service question rather than a settled legal one, and neither document alleges a criminal charge.