Anthropic has already been burned before on this. DeepSeek was trained on million of conversations with Claude. And DeepSeek created thousands of free accounts to burn all this compute at their expense.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
I think the extent of distillation by Deepseek specifically is overstated. For comparison, Minimax collected over 13m 'exchanges', which starts to sound a lot more like large-scale distillation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek
> In February 2026, Anthropic accused DeepSeek of using thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of conversations with Claude to train its own large language models.[57]