Anthropic has disclosed that Alibaba conducted the largest campaign to extract Claude's capabilities, generating over 28.8 million exchanges through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June. The attack occurred after Trump's warnings against AI model cloning and highlights what Anthropic views as a systematic effort by Chinese companies to avoid the costs of training frontier models independently. Anthropic is calling on Congress to strengthen export controls, update antitrust law, and penalize such behavior to protect US AI leadership.
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Between April 22 and June 5, operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts, violating Claude's terms of service. The campaign targeted capabilities such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks, using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks to evade detection.
Why it matters
Alibaba's alleged attack comes weeks after Donald Trump warned that cloning US frontier AI models was unacceptable and a threat to national security. Anthropic argues that these distillation campaigns turn billions of dollars in American investment into a subsidy for geopolitical competitors and could accelerate China's access to advanced AI capabilities without the training costs.
What to watch
Anthropic has recommended three policy steps to Congress: updating antitrust laws to allow AI firms to share information about Chinese tactics, increasing export controls on advanced chips, and passing laws penalizing Chinese labs' reliance on distillation attacks. The company warns that without intervention, these attacks could help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner.
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