Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of orchestrating what it describes as the largest known distillation attack of its kind, allegedly using tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to systematically extract capabilities from its AI model, Claude. The accusations were reportedly made directly to US lawmakers and signal a significant escalation in tensions over AI intellectual property between American and Chinese technology firms.
The alleged operation reportedly involved nearly 25,000 fake accounts and generated close to 29 million exchanges with Claude over just six weeks, a volume that underscores how industrialized this type of AI extraction activity may be becoming.
The claims add Alibaba to a growing list of Chinese AI developers that Anthropic says have targeted its models. They also arrive at a time when the global race for AI supremacy is intensifying at a pace that is reshaping both corporate strategy and geopolitics.
Inside the Alleged Campaign
According to Anthropic's account to US lawmakers, operators linked to Alibaba and the company's Qwen AI team generated 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026, a roughly six-week period. The alleged campaign did not target Claude's source code, model weights, or original training data. Instead, Anthropic claims the fraudulent accounts repeatedly posed carefully designed questions to Claude and collected the responses at scale.
That process is known as distillation, a technique in which a company uses the outputs of a larger, more capable AI model to train a smaller, cheaper one. The smaller model learns to replicate the useful behaviors of the more powerful system without requiring the same computing resources.
The areas targeted were notably specific. The alleged campaign focused on software development, multi-step reasoning, and agentic tasks, the kinds of capabilities that allow an AI model to plan and execute complex, multi-stage work rather than simply respond to individual prompts. Anthropic told lawmakers the campaign could help Chinese AI developers approach the capabilities of its Mythos Preview model, which is focused on advanced cybersecurity work, including identifying and exploiting complex software vulnerabilities.
An Industry Under Pressure
Francesco Pili, Counsel at Hogan Lovells, said the accusations are part of a pattern that extends well beyond Anthropic.
"This is part of a broader trend of regulatory disputes over whether, and on what terms, AI systems can access third-party platforms, services, or data," he said.
