In the long contest over who will shape the intelligence of machines, Anthropic has stepped forward with a serious accusation: that Chinese AI companies — Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek among them — quietly harvested millions of conversations with its Claude model to train competing systems, a practice known as distillation. The allegation, made public rather than pursued in silence, raises one of the defining questions of the AI era — whether the knowledge crystallized in a model's responses belongs to its maker, and what it means when rivals learn not from raw data, but from the mind of