American Commerce Department cited national security risks and imposed restrictions on Anthropic's most advanced models, leading Anthropic to disable global access to them. No access – no profits. Stupid us.
“U.S. artificial-intelligence lab Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba of "illicitly" accessing its frontier model Claude to harvest its capabilities.
In a letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic claimed that Alibaba and its AI unit conducted "the largest known distillation attack" on the company to date.
The attacks, which involve training a model on the outputs of a stronger one, are turning "billions of dollars in American investment and R&D into a massive subsidy for our geopolitical competitors," it said.
The letter, dated June 10, was addressed to U.S. Senators Tim Scott (R., S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and claimed Alibaba created almost 25,000 fake accounts to access Claude through 29 million exchanges with the AI model, which is not available to entities in China.
According to the letter, "Alibaba's campaign targeted some of Claude's most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks."
An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the contents of the letter but said: "We believe combating the threat of illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry, and we will continue working with Congress and the Administration to maintain American AI leadership."
Alibaba didn't respond to a request for comment.
It's not the first time Anthropic has said Chinese AI labs are using its technology to train their own AI models.
In a blog post in February, Anthropic said it had identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories to extract Claude's capabilities.
The latest accusations come after the Trump administration issued a memorandum in April saying foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems.
Anthropic's letter said the company is supportive of Washington's efforts to combat such attacks, while also calling for more action to secure American AI, including tightening chip controls and legislation to penalize AI labs found to be engaging in distillation.
Alibaba shares dropped 4.4% Thursday in Hong Kong, underperforming the Hang Seng Tech Index's 1.43% decline.
But that came alongside a broader decline in other China tech majors trading in Hong Kong.
"Given this is not the first distillation allegation targeting Chinese firms, I expect the reputational damage to be small," said Laila Khawaja, a research director at Gavekal Technologies.
What matters is whether Anthropic will take further measures to crack down on distillation, and whether its repeated complaints to the U.S. government will lead to more concrete Anthropic-related export controls, she said.” [1]
1. Business News: Anthropic Claims Alibaba Accessed Claude AI Model. Chau, Jason; Qu, Tracy. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 June 2026: B3.
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