U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic has accused Alibaba Group Holding Ltd of illicitly extracting capabilities from its Claude AI models in what it described as the largest known attack of its kind on the company.
Anthropic said the Chinese technology and e-commerce giant carried out a “distillation” effort, a process in which a less capable AI model is trained using outputs generated by a more advanced model.
The company said the campaign ran from April 22 to June 5, 2026, generating more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts.
In the letter, Anthropic said distillation could accelerate China’s ability to develop advanced AI capabilities, including its Mythos Preview models.
It said the campaign was conducted by operators linked to Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, the company’s artificial intelligence research unit. Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter, dated June 10, was sent to U.S. Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, ahead of a scheduled hearing on artificial intelligence.
In April, the White House accused China of stealing intellectual property from U.S. AI companies on an industrial scale.
Anthropic said it supported U.S. government efforts to counter such activity, including cooperation with private-sector AI firms through threat-intelligence sharing and other exercises.
The company said in a February post that it had identified similar campaigns by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and two other Chinese AI labs aimed at illicitly extracting capabilities from its Claude platform.
Anthropic said DeepSeek’s operation involved more than 150,000 exchanges, while Moonshot AI’s campaign involved more than 3.4 million exchanges and MiniMax’s involved more than 13 million.
It said at the time that the campaigns were increasing in “intensity and sophistication” and that addressing the threat would require “rapid, coordinated action among industry players, policymakers and the global AI community.”
Alibaba was added to the Pentagon’s list of Chinese military companies this month, a designation it is challenging.
The U.S. Commerce Department has held off placing DeepSeek on a trade blacklist, despite the company being deemed a national security risk by an interagency government committee, as officials seek to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing.
Meanwhile, two days after Anthropic sent its letter, the Commerce Department imposed restrictions on Anthropic’s latest Mythos and Fable AI models, citing concerns they could be used by military intelligence users in China and other countries of concern. The restrictions led Anthropic to disable access to the models globally.
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Faustine Ngila is the AI Editor at Impact Newswire, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is an award-winning journalist specializing in artificial intelligence, blockchain, and emerging technologies.
He previously worked as a global technology reporter at Quartz in New York and Digital Frontier in London, where he covered innovation, startups, and the global digital economy.
With years of experience reporting on cutting-edge technologies, Faustine focuses on AI developments, industry trends, and the impact of technology on society.
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