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Anthropic Accuses Chinese AI Firms of Data Theft, OpenAI Strikes Consulting Deals, IBM Shares Plunge, and £40m Aircraft Fraud Ends in Jail

The global AI race is escalating into open confrontation after U.S. startup Anthropic accused Chinese rivals of industrial-scale intellectual property theft, alleging millions of exchanges were used to extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot. At the same time, OpenAI is deepening its enterprise push with multiyear partnerships with top consulting firms, aiming to embed AI agents into corporate workflows. Meanwhile, shares of IBM tumbled after Anthropic signaled its tools could disrupt the legacy COBOL systems that underpin much of Big Blue’s business. And in the aviation world, a former DJ has been jailed over a £40 million fake aircraft parts scheme that rippled through major global airlines. All this and more in today’s Read It and Eat!



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Markets as of 23rd February 2026. Cells in RED mean that the value is down, cells in Green mean the value is up.


MAJOR HEADLINES




  • Anthropic; after stealing data off the Internet to train its LLM, Accuses China's AI firms of stealing from them

     

     

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic said on Monday it had uncovered campaigns by three Chinese AI firms to illicitly extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot, in what it described as industrial-scale intellectual property theft. OpenAI leveled similar charges last month. Anthropic said DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax used a technique known as “distillation”, using outputs from a more powerful AI system to rapidly boost the performance of a less capable one.

 

“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,” the company said in a statement. “The window to act is narrow.” Distillation is a common practice within AI development, often used by companies to create cheaper, smaller versions of their own models. The practice grabbed headlines a year ago when the release of a low-cost generative AI model from DeepSeek performed at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top American chatbots, upending assumptions of US dominance in the sensitive sector. Anthropic said the companies achieved their ends through approximately 16m exchanges with its Claude model and 24,000 fake accounts. 

 

The company argued the practice posed national security risks, saying models built through illicit distillation are unlikely to retain safety guardrails designed to prevent misuse, such as restrictions on helping develop bioweapons or enabling cyberattacks. Anthropic’s arch-rival OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, made similar accusations to US lawmakers earlier this month, saying Chinese companies were using the technique amid “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs”. Anthropic said MiniMax ran the largest operation, generating more than 13m exchanges. Each campaign concentrated heavily on coding, agentic reasoning and tool use, areas where Claude is considered a leader. TheGuardian



  •  OpenAI lands multiyear deals with consulting giants in enterprise push

 

Microsoft's head of gaming, Phil Spencer, is leaving the software maker following a 38-year tenure, as the company's Xbox business faces increased challenges. Spencer's exit follows the departures of business development chief Chris Young and GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in 2025. Charlie Bell, who had been Microsoft's most high-ranking security leader, switched to an individual contributor role earlier this month. 

 

Revenue from video games at Microsoft declined about 10% in the December quarter from a year earlier, a steeper drop than the company expected, while total revenue grew nearly 17%. Microsoft announced an unspecified impairment charge in its gaming business in January. The company made a $75 billion bet to expand its games business with the 2023 acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and it released Call of Duty titles as a cloud service. But current generation Xbox consoles haven't been as popular as Sony's PlayStation or Nintendo's Switch, and Microsoft has shuttered studios working on new games. 

 

OpenAI on Monday announced it is entering into multiyear partnerships with four consulting firms that will help the company deploy its enterprise platform called Frontier.  The artificial intelligence startup said it has formed “Frontier Alliances” with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini and McKinsey & Co., according to a release. 

 

Lan Guan, the chief AI and data officer at Accenture, said OpenAI’s Frontier Alliances serve as an example of how product companies, consulting companies and strategy companies should come together to accelerate AI deployment. “This is the inflection moment,” Guan said in an interview. “It’s our time to help enterprise clients to actually realize the value of AI.” OpenAI is racing against rivals like Google, and Anthropic to win users and market share, and the company has made an aggressive push to court enterprise customers in recent months. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC in January that enterprises account for roughly 40% of OpenAI’s business, though she expects that figure to reach closer to 50% by the end of the year.

 

Frontier, which OpenAI unveiled earlier this month, acts as an intelligence layer that stitches together disparate systems and data within an organization. It aims to make it easier for companies to manage, deploy and build AI agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of a user. OpenAI said its consulting partners will help its customers define their strategy and get agents into real production workflows more quickly. The consulting firms will work alongside OpenAI’s forward deployed engineers, who have deep technical expertise and are embedded directly within different businesses.  The firms are also building teams and investing in “dedicated practice groups” that will be certified on OpenAI technology. They’ll be supported with road map insight, access to technical resources, and OpenAI’s product and research teams, OpenAI said. CNBC


  • IBM is the latest AI casualty. Shares tank 13% on Anthropic programming language threat


International Business Machines stock is getting slammed Monday, becoming the latest perceived victim of rapidly developing AI technology, after Anthropic said its Claude Code tool could be used to modernize legacy systems that run COBOL. 

 

Shares of IBM closed the day lower by nearly 13.2%, at $223.35 per share, after Anthropic on Monday said Claude Code could be used to automate the exploration and analysis work that drives most of the complexity in COBOL modernization, a key IBM business. IBM has long sold mainframe systems that are optimized for large-scale transaction processing, where COBOL has often been used. Short for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL is a dominant code system developed in the late 1950s often used in business data processing, such as payment processing and retail transaction systems. An estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the U.S. use COBOL, according to Anthropic, making it a prime target for cost-efficient AI disruption.

 

“Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government. Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year,” Anthropic wrote in a Monday blog post. “AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive.” Claude Code can help modernize COBOL codebases by mapping dependencies across thousands of lines of code, documenting workflows and identifying risks that “would take human analysts months to surface,” Anthropic said.  “Legacy code modernization stalled for years because understanding legacy code cost more than rewriting it. AI flips that equation,” the blog post said. CNBC



  • Ex-techno DJ jailed for global aircraft engine fraud

 

A one-time techno DJ who orchestrated a £40m global fraud selling fake aircraft parts from his garage outside London has been jailed. Engine parts from AOG Technics found their way into planes used by American Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines, Delta and Ryanair before the scam was discovered, leading to regulators issuing safety alerts and planes being grounded.

 

Jose Alejandro Zamora Yrala, director of the firm, was on Monday sentenced at Southwark crown court to four years and eight months in prison, after pleading guilty to fraud. An investigation by the Serious Fraud Office found that Zamora Yrala, 38, bought aircraft engine parts including seals, bolts and washers and sold them on to airlines and suppliers around the world, with forged certificates guaranteeing their airworthiness. Between 2019 and July 2023, AOG Technics sold more than 60,000 parts worth £6.9m from a home office in Surrey. Many parts AOG sold were for use in the CFM56 engine, found in the world’s most widely used Airbus and Boeing aircraft models.

 

The SFO said Zamora Yrala used his home computer to doctor genuine certificates and create false delivery records from manufacturers. He also invented fake employees, sending emails and documents signed by nonexistent quality managers.

The fraud was stopped in August 2023 when an airline contacted the manufacturer to check the authenticity of an AOG part. Planes around the world were grounded after the UK, US and EU aviation agencies issued safety alerts. Estimated losses to airlines ran to more than £39.3m.

Ethiopian Airlines had directly bought more than £1.1m worth of parts from Zamora Yrala. American Airlines did not buy directly from AOG but found that 28 of its engines eventually were affected by the fraudulently certified parts, causing it losses of more than £21m. Ryanair said it found fake parts in two planes, coming via third parties. Financial Times

 

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  • Waymo achieves 200 million driverless miles MSN

 

 

  • Bitcoin prices continued their slide, trading recently around $65,000 CNBC

 

  • India amends tax treaty with France, cuts dividend tax for major investors Reuters

 

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