Anthropic Alleges Alibaba Ran Mass Account Scheme to Distill Claude AI

Anthropic accused Alibaba and its Qwen research division of illicitly accessing its Claude models in what it called the largest known AI distillation attack against the company. In a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, Anthropic said operators used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 28.8 million Claude exchanges between April 22 and June 5, targeting high-value capabilities from the Mythos Preview model, including software engineering and agentic reasoning. The company said the activity was designed to replicate frontier-model performance without incurring the full cost of training a competing system.

Anthropic warned that adversarial distillation can transfer advanced capabilities while omitting the original model’s safety guardrails, raising both security and national security concerns beyond intellectual property theft. The company linked the alleged operation to a broader pattern involving other Chinese AI labs, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, and called for antitrust-safe threat intelligence sharing, continued AI chip export controls, and penalties for firms found to have improperly used U.S. model outputs. The disclosure has also spurred proposed U.S. legislative action, including potential sanctions or blacklisting of Chinese companies accused of training rival systems on unauthorized American AI outputs.