Anthropic says its October 2026 anti-distillation defenses cut the data distillers harvest from Claude by 90 to 99%

Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks

Anthropic describes new defenses against illicit distillation of Claude, including preserved thinking, a two-stage classifier, and account bans, which cut extracted reasoning tokens 10-100x. It argues distillation threatens national security and urges all developers and platforms to act.