China's Internet Regulator Opens Investigation Into DeepSeek and Moonshot Over Data Routed to Claude

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has opened an investigation into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI over allegations that both companies routed user prompts to Anthropic's Claude models, according to The Information. The regulator first summoned representatives of all seven Chinese laboratories named in Anthropic's September threat report, then narrowed its focus to these two.

The underlying claims come from Anthropic's own threat intelligence report. Anthropic alleges that Moonshot routed more than 23 million exchanges to Claude between May and July, and that DeepSeek routed more than 12.1 million over a 14-day period in July. It says the prompts contained names, email addresses, company data and other sensitive material belonging to hundreds of end users across at least a dozen languages, including material from multinational companies and state-affiliated actors. The CAC is reported to be examining whether police, military and state-linked corporate data reached US-operated models through this route. Neither DeepSeek nor Moonshot has publicly confirmed the routing, and Anthropic is a direct commercial competitor to both, a fact worth weighing given that only one party has the logs needed to prove the claim.

If substantiated, the allegation undermines a claim that has been central to the commercial case for Chinese open-weight models: that they form an independent technology stack, trained and served without dependence on American systems. A model provider that quietly relies on a US frontier API for difficult requests is selling capability it does not fully own. The episode also gives Washington a concrete argument for tightening access to US model endpoints, and gives Beijing a concrete argument for tightening data-export enforcement on its own companies. The reporting comes ahead of scheduled Trump-Xi discussions that are expected to cover artificial intelligence.