Anthropic vs DeepSeek: ‘Data Theft’ War Explodes as Titans Clash

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As Anthropic levels explosive data theft accusations against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, Elon Musk fires back — triggering a high-stakes AI war

By S. JHA

Mumbai, February 24, 2026 — Dr. Ian Malcolm was a mathematician in the 1993 blockbuster film Jurassic Park. Essayed by Jeff Goldblum, the character argues for his “Chaos Theory” and warns against scientific hubris.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” Dr. Malcolm chastises creators of dinosaurs in a lab. “Life finds a way,” he states prophetically in the film.

The scientific genius in reviving extinct dinosaurs turns into a chaos that directly threaten the humans. In the bygone era, comets reportedly struck earth that destroyed dinosaurs. In the world of fiction, the giant creatures destroyed themselves after the chaos.

Three decades later, the warning of Dr Malcom is echoing in the Silicon Valley as AI titans accuse each other of theft. On Monday evening, Anthropic accused a number of AI giants of data theft. “We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax,” Anthropic said in a public statement.

The American startup is shaking up not just the tech world, but even its AI peers. Sam Altman, the AI czar with OpenAI pedigree, had refused to buy Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s solidarity charm in New Delhi on the stage at the India AI Impact Summit. His right hand was clasped with Modi. But left hand formed into a fist that crossed with the fisted raised hand of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. While OpenAI is riding billions in investments, Anthropic is a fresh arrival in the world of AI.

Anthropic on Monday announced that “Claude can streamline COBOL code.” Shares of IBM went crashing by 10 percent. Shares of large cap Indian IT firms have already crashed by over 25 percent in recent months. Anthropic has also triggered an avalanche of futuristic analysis that claims that “India will begin discussions with IMF by early 2028.” This in the world of economy means that India will struggle with balance of payment crisis. The centerpiece argument is that $200 billion of earning of Indian IT firms will vanish soon to send India to the IMF.

Billionaire Elon Musk went ballistic on X over claims of Anthropic over data theft. Musk accused the American startup of “stealing codes written by humans.”

“These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models,” Anthropic said in its public statement.

Musk, who is helming AI models on X platform, mocked, saying that “Anthropic is guilty of stealing training data at massive scale and has had to pay multi-billion-dollar settlements for their theft. This is just a fact.”

Anthropic suggested in its statement that data theft may be legitimate if it’s within America, but problematic if it’s done by a Chinese firm. “Distillation can be legitimate: AI labs use it to create smaller, cheaper models for their customers. But foreign labs that illicitly distil American models can remove safeguards, feeding model capabilities into their own military, intelligence, and surveillance systems,” said Anthropic in remarks that sought shelter in American push to dominate the tech world.