Anthropic?accused Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group Holding?of waging a large-scale effort to ¡°illicitly¡± access its Claude artificial intelligence model using thousands of fraudulent accounts that undermine the U.S. AI developer¡¯s decision to keep its products out of China.
Anthropic claimed that a campaign by operators linked to Alibaba¡¯s Qwen AI lab targeted Claude¡¯s most prized capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning, according to a letter that the AI startup sent to several U.S. senators and White House officials. The company said it was the biggest attempt so far by a Chinese company to piggyback on the work of top U.S. labs.
In its letter, Anthropic claimed that the effort involved 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts, according to people familiar with the document and a copy seen by Bloomberg News. The company said the Alibaba campaign resembled past efforts by other Chinese developers that Anthropic flagged in a blog post earlier this year.
Alibaba¡¯s American depositary receipts sank to a session low on the news, falling more than 3% to $99.10 at 3:38 p.m. in New York on Wednesday.
Anthropic warned that Alibaba and other Chinese labs are making systematic and unauthorized use of results from leading U.S. models to develop a rival generation of chatbots at a fraction of the cost via a practice known as adversarial distillation. It cautioned that AI systems built using this method often lack safety guardrails, and the firm urged the Trump administration to step up efforts to halt the practice.
¡°These distillation attacks are carried out illicitly, systematically, and at industrial scale to harvest U.S. Al capabilities across frontier labs and repackage them as their own without incurring the training and R&D costs required to train U.S. frontier models,¡± Anthropic wrote in its letter.
Alibaba had no comment. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to enter into specifics on the letter but emphasized the importance of combating distillation through ¡°coordinated action between government and industry.¡±
Anthropic¡¯s letter marked the latest call from top American AI companies to rein in some kinds of distillation, where developers train systems using results from another AI model to create similar capabilities in a new one at a far lower cost. While tolerated for training smaller, less-advanced systems, distillation violates AI labs¡¯ terms of use when it¡¯s employed to replicate a cutting-edge AI model without permission.
The practice has alarmed U.S. developers to the point that Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet¡¯s Google have joined forces to share information about distillation attempts that violate their terms of service. Anthropic and OpenAI have each warned that Chinese AI startups, including DeepSeek and Minimax, have employed distillation to develop their own models.
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