OpenAI and Anthropic allege improper distillation of their models. Investors have pushed Chinese AI valuations sky-high anyway—raising a harder question about pricing power. Anthropic isn’t just sparring with Washington over military use of Claude. It’s also accusing Chinese AI labs of siphoning off value from it. Last month, OpenAI and Anthropic publicly alleged that Chinese AI companies have been improperly extracting capabilities—coding, reasoning and other behaviors—from their proprietary models to train their own competing models, using a technique called “distillation.” In a February 23 press release, Anthropic claimed DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot AI prompted its Claude models 16 million times through roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. Earlier this month, OpenAI sent a letter to U.S. lawmakers alleging that DeepSeek similarly improperly trained their models on outputs from OpenAI’s models. Google’s threat intelligence arm, without naming a company, warned in a February report of a rise in distillation attacks targeting Gemini. The accused companies have not publicly commented on allegations of wrongdoing, and didn’t respond to Forbes’ requests for comment. But the broader point is hard to ignore: Several of these Chinese models are now nearly as good as their American counterparts. Many are open source. Most are cheaper. And that combination is starting to erode confidence in the expensive economics of the entire sector. “It’s not easy to build these models, and [distillation] is a way to leapfrog that process,” says John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google’s Threat Intelligence Group.  Jenny Xiao, a venture capitalist at Leonis Capital who formerly worked on trust and safety at OpenAI, is more blunt: “Open source models are essentially a kill line.” Have a tip about AI model makers as they navigate the markets, geopolitics and national security? Contact Phoebe Liu at pliu@forbes.com, phoebe.789 on Signal or _pheebini on WeChat. While American labs warn about intellectual property violations, Chinese AI stocks are running hot. MiniMax and Z.ai (not named in the U.S. companies’ claims) went public in Hong Kong in January, minting new billionaires. Skyrocketing shares have since catapulted the net worths of MiniMax chairman and CEO Yan Junjie and Z.ai chairman Liu Debing to $7.1 billion and $8.7 billion, respectively—roughly in the range of Anthropic’s seven billionaire cofounders, now worth $7 billion apiece. There are others. Z.ai’s runup makes Liu’s cofounder, Tsinghua University professor Tang Jie, a new billionaire as well, worth $1.9 billion. DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng debuted this year as the richest newcomer on Forbes Asia’s China’s 100 Richest list, worth an estimated $11.5 billion. And Moonshot AI founder and CEO Yang Zhilin is set to become a billionaire when the Kimi model maker’s current funding round, reportedly at a $10 billion valuation, closes. Based on comparative valuation metrics, Wang Xiaochuan of Baichuan and Jiang Daxin of Stepful may have entered the billionaires’ club as well. Read the full story on Forbes: By Phoebe Liu https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/02/copying-ai-chinese-founders-minimax-deepseek-moonshot-billions/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices