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Anthropic calls out China's AI copycats

PLUS: Build better slide decks with AI

Zach Mink

February 24, 2026

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. China's AI rise has been one of the most impressive stories in tech, but Anthropic says it had help from an unlikely source: Claude itself.

The company just revealed that Chinese labs DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot ran a combined 16M exchanges across thousands of fake accounts to clone Claude’s capabilities into their own models, a scheme it says demands industry-wide action.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • Anthropic catches Chinese labs copying Claude

  • Meta's AI safety chief ‘humbled’ by OpenClaw bot

  • How to build better slide decks with AI

  • OpenAI enlists consulting giants for Frontier agents

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🕵️ Anthropic catches Chinese labs copying Claude

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Anthropic just revealed that DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax ran coordinated ops to siphon Claude's capabilities through 16M+ fraudulent exchanges across 24K fake accounts — a threat it says demands immediate industry-wide action.

The details:

  • Anthropic accused the labs of distillation via the conversations, which involves training a weaker system on the outputs from a stronger one.

  • MiniMax ran the largest campaign at 13M+ exchanges, and Anthropic caught it mid-operation, spotting the lab shift focus to a new release in under 24 hours.

  • DeepSeek had Claude spell out reasoning step-by-step and rewrite politically sensitive queries, generating training data for both logic and censorship.

  • OAI raised similar concerns with Congress weeks ago, and Anthropic is now pushing for coordinated action from the broader AI industry and government.

Why it matters: Chinese AI has been pulling closer and closer to the frontier — but it’s looking like it may have at least partially been on the backs of the same models they are chasing. But the labs also may find the public low on sympathy, given the industry’s own legal issues and controversies over where their training data comes from.

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META

🦞 Meta's AI safety chief ‘humbled’ by OpenClaw bot

Image source: Lovart / The Rundown

The Rundown: Meta AI alignment director Summer Yue revealed that her OpenClaw agent went rogue on her inbox, saying it ignored stop commands and started to mass-delete her emails — forcing her to sprint to her Mac mini to kill the process.

The details:

  • Yue said the bot ran fine on a test inbox for weeks, but lost her "confirm before acting" prompt when she gave it access to her much larger real inbox.

  • Yue called it a "rookie mistake," saying that "alignment researchers aren't immune to misalignment".

  • Elon Musk piled on, posting "Someone who got p0wned by OpenClaw is definitely gonna solve AI safety" in response to Yue’s situation.

  • The viral OpenClaw has been the agentic talk of the industry, with creator Peter Steinberger recently being hired by OAI after also receiving an offer from Meta.

Why it matters: OpenClaw is just the first wave of agents getting full access to digital lives, so the fact that Meta’s alignment director is having this experience doesn’t bode well for novices (in its current form). The agentic path is still early in being paved, and this is just one of many insane situations set to pop up along the journey.

AI TRAINING

💼 Build better slide decks with AI

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn to take raw data and turn it into a presentation-ready slide deck. This works whether you're starting from a spreadsheet, a meeting transcript, a long document, or just bullet points.

Step-by-step:

  1. Grab the files you want to start with. This could be a CSV export from Shopify or Google Analytics, a meeting transcript from Zoom, or a scope of work

  2. Launch Claude, attach the file/doc, and prompt: “I need you to turn these documents into a slide deck outline. Before you start, ask me 5 multiple-choice questions about the purpose, audience, tone, and structure”

  3. Answer the Qs to get Claude’s outline. Then, go to Gamma > Create New > Generate from outline and paste it. Click Continue and check the deck preview

  4. Finally, click Generate, and Gamma will create a full deck for you that you can edit with AI and export as a PowerPoint or PDF

Pro tip: In preview, select “Preserve” and “Concise” options to get the best slide deck.

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The Rundown: Your buyers are asking, and AI is answering with someone else’s company. Not because you are worse, but because your website doesn’t answer the questions AI looks for. Tely makes Google, ChatGPT, & Claude recommend your business — so when people ask, they find you and reach out.

With Tely AI, you can:

  • Get recommended in ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity, and Claude in as little as 1 week

  • Fully hands-off: no writers, no agencies, no managing content

  • Costs less than hiring freelancers or maintaining a marketing team

  • Ideal for niche industries where expertise matters

Get leads from Google and ChatGPT on autopilot.

OPENAI

💼 OpenAI enlists consulting giants for Frontier agents

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI just announced new multi-year deals with consulting giants McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini as part of the company’s new “Frontier Alliance” enterprise platform push.

The details:

  • OpenAI launched Frontier in early February, a platform giving enterprises the ability to manage AI agents like new hires across existing tech stacks.

  • ‘Frontier Alliance’ partners will work with OpenAI to help their customers actually integrate AI into their corporate workflows and systems.

  • The firms are building certified teams that will work alongside OAI's own engineers, with Accenture already running staff through enterprise AI training.

Why it matters: Building the best AI means nothing if companies can't figure out where to plug it in, and that gap is exactly what OpenAI and the big consulting firms are looking to close. The irony is that a technology seemingly racing to replace white-collar work is now enlisting the leading consulting firms to get companies AI-integrated.

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📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic announced that Claude Code can now automate COBOL modernization, a core part of IBM's consulting business that sent its shares tumbling by over 10%.

Google launched a new free Gemini training program for all 6M educators in the U.S., the largest AI literacy initiative for teachers to date.

Pentagon chief Peter Hegseth reportedly summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over military AI access, with officials threatening to cut ties if safeguards aren't lifted.

The Pentagon also signed a new deal with xAI to put Grok in its classified systems, giving the military an additional option to Claude as tensions rise with Anthropic.

Citrini Research posted a report of hypothetical scenarios of how agentic AI would impact the economy, with many crediting it for playing a role in Monday’s stock selloff.

Spotify expanded its AI-powered Prompted Playlists to the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Sweden, letting Premium users type a text prompt to create custom mixes.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Danny W. in Nashville, TN:

"I use Gemini and NotebookLM to do genealogy of my ancestors in southern Scotland from the 1300's to the 1800's. I have loaded over 100 sources of Scottish history, from web pages to 200-year-old, 500-page history books.

I have found 12 farms where my ancestors were tenant farmers in the 1600's and 1700's. I also use NotebookLM to create podcasts summarizing these books or on particular topics like how they ate and how they got clothing back then. NONE of what I've accomplished could have been done before AI."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown

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