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Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba of orchestrating the largest known 'distillation' attack against its Claude AI model, involving nearly 28.8 million exchanges made through approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June 2026 Source: BBC. In a letter to US Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, Anthropic stated that operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab targeted Claude's most valuable capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning Source: Gizmodo.
According to Anthropic, the campaign far exceeded previous distillation efforts by Chinese startups DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax, which collectively generated 16 million exchanges earlier this year Source: Tom's Hardware. The company emphasized that the attacks occurred despite a White House memo in April warning against such practices Source: The Next Web. Anthropic called for coordinated government-industry action to combat illicit distillation, which it says turns US investment into a subsidy for competitors Source: Infobae.
Alibaba has not publicly responded to the allegations, but the news comes as the company sues the US Department of Defense to remove itself from a blacklist of Chinese military-linked firms Source: BBC. Anthropic's letter also cited national security concerns, warning that models built through distillation often lack safety guardrails Source: Tom's Hardware. The accusation adds to tensions between US and Chinese AI developers, with OpenAI previously making similar claims against DeepSeek .
“US artificial intelligence (AI) giant Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce and technology firm Alibaba of 'brazenly' and 'illicitly' extracting its Claude AI model's capabilities.”
“Between late April and early June, according to Anthropic, Alibaba allegedly used nearly 25,000 fraudulent Claude accounts to conduct tens of millions of exchanges with the chatbot, which were used as raw training data for Alibaba's AI system—a process known in the industry as adversarial distillation.”
“Anthropic says that it traced the distillation campaign back to operators that had connections with Alibaba, one of the largest Chinese tech companies often compared to Amazon, and Alibaba Qwen, its AI lab.”
“"Estos ataques de destilación se llevan a cabo de forma ilícita, sistemática y a escala industrial para aprovechar las capacidades de IA estadounidenses en laboratorios de vanguardia y presentarlas como propias sin incurrir en los costos de capacitación e I+D necesarios para entrenar los modelos estadounidenses de vanguardia", reza la carta de Anthropic.”