AI giant Anthropic recently accused Chinese AI labs of stealing data from its Claude model. Now Tesla CEO Elon Musk has weighed in with sharp criticism. In a post of social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Musk suggested that Anthropic itself is guilty of similar practices. He also pointed out to reports that the company used copyrighted books and free online data to train its models. “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,” wrote Musk.

Anthropic’s allegations of DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot AI

According to a report by Business Insider, in a statement Anthropic said that these Chinese albs orchestrated industrial-scale distillation campaigns, creating roughly 24,000 fraudulent Claude accounts that generated more than 16 million exchanges in violation of its terms of service and regional restrictions. For those unaware, distillation is a process where smaller model is trained on the outputs of a larger one, is widely used in AI development. However, Anthropic argues that its Chinese rivals are exploiting the practice to steal capabilities at a fraction of the time and cost it would take to build independently.Musk’s criticism comes amid heightened tensions between US and Chinese AI companies. While Anthropic insists its rivals are stealing intellectual property, Musk and others have pointed out that US firms themselves face scrutiny over how they source training data. Last year, Anthropic settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit with authors and publishers over claims it used copyrighted books without permission.

Elon Musk calls AI models of Anthropic ‘Evil’

Earlier this month, Elon Musk criticised rival AI company Anthropic whose recent AI updates triggered a nearly trillion-dollar selloff in enterprise software stocks and accused its models of being ‘misanthropic and evil’. The comments made by Musk came in response to Anthropic’s announcement on social media platform X (formerly known as twitter) that it has closed $30 billion funding round at the valuation of $380 billion. It is one of the largest private tech raises to date. “We’ve raised $30B in funding at a $380B post-money valuation. This investment will help us deepen our research, continue to innovate in products, and ensure we have the resources to power our infrastructure expansion as we make Claude available everywhere our customers are,” wrote Anthropic.In response to this post, Musk alleged that Anthropic’s AI systems exhibit racial and demographic bias. “Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men. This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it. Frankly, I don’t think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being Misanthropic. You were doomed to this fate when you chose your name. The Name of the Wind,” wrote Musk.