Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of an “abrupt” and “illegal” attempt to copy its AI models, using tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of queries and then feed the resulting data into its own designs.
Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of an “abrupt” and “illegal” attempt to copy its AI models, using tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to generate millions of queries and then feed the resulting data into its own designs.
As CNBC reports , citing Bloomberg, Anthropic sent a letter to the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Development on June 10. The company notes in the letter that Alibaba carried out “the largest distillation attack known to date” on its systems.
Distillation is a method of training AI in which a smaller, less powerful model is trained on the performance of an existing, stronger model. According to Anthropic, operators associated with Alibaba and its AI lab conducted 28.8 million data exchanges with the company's models between April 22 and June 5. About 25,000 fake accounts were used to circumvent the restrictions.
“We believe that combating the threat of illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry, and we will continue to work with Congress and the Administration to maintain US leadership in the field of AI,” said an Anthropic representative. The letter also emphasizes that Alibaba deliberately ignored the warnings of the presidential administration about the inadmissibility of such actions. Official representatives of Alibaba have not yet commented on the situation.
This incident is not the first time that the company’s technology has been copied without authorization. Back in February, Anthropic uncovered three industrial distillation campaigns by other developers: DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax.
Complicating matters, the Trump administration issued an export control directive earlier this month that forced Anthropic to suspend access to its latest Claude models (Fable 5 and Mythos 5) to all foreign nationals, including its own foreign employees. The government cited national security concerns, and the company is currently in talks in Washington to lift the restrictions as soon as possible.
