Anthropic has accused Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab of running fake accounts to extract Claude’s capabilities at scale, telling the U.S. Senate Banking Committee that operators linked to Alibaba generated 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts.
The AI safety company calls it the largest “distillation attack” it has documented to date. The accusation was sent in a letter to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren as seen by Bloomberg, Reuters, and CNBC. Alibaba has not formally responded to the Senate committee, although its stated position to reporters is that it does not use outputs from proprietary AI models to train its own systems and that its AI development complies with applicable intellectual property law.
What Anthropic Is Alleging
Dated June 10, Anthropic’s letter describes a campaign of fake accounts sending structured prompts designed to pull out specific abilities rather than mimic normal use. The targets were the areas where Claude performs best, including agentic reasoning, software engineering, and tasks that unfold across many steps.
Anthropic’s letter, as reported by CNBC, called the operators’ conduct “brazenly” and “illicitly” aimed at extracting its AI capabilities. China sits among the regions where Anthropic prohibits use of its services, citing legal, regulatory, and security risks. What this means is that the accounts behind the campaign would also have broken that restriction on top of the company’s terms of service.
What Model Extraction Means
The technique at the center of this dispute is called distillation. A company trains a smaller “student” model by feeding it large volumes of answers generated by a stronger “teacher” model, then uses those answers as training data.
Distillation is a normal and legal part of AI development when a company uses it to build a cheaper or faster version of its own model. However, it becomes illegal when a competitor uses it to acquire those capabilities from another company’s model at a fraction of the time and cost it would otherwise take.
Why This Case Stands Out
In February, Anthropic disclosed three separate distillation campaigns, attributed to DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, that added up to roughly 16.5 million exchanges combined. The Alibaba campaign alone is close to double that total. And Anthropic also says the target shifted.
Where the February campaigns went after general Claude performance, the alleged Alibaba effort zeroed in on the high-value agentic and coding capabilities that are the most commercially important part of Anthropic’s business.
Anthropic’s case to lawmakers goes beyond lost revenue, as there’s the security argument. The company argues that illicitly distilled models lack the necessary safeguards of the original, meaning dangerous capabilities can spread with many protections stripped out entirely.
What Happens Next
While no regulator or court has ruled on the dispute, Anthropic definitely wants Washington involved directly. The company’s letter follows a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum issued two months earlier that pledged government support for companies trying to detect and coordinate against industrial-scale distillation.
But for now, the claims sit with a Senate committee rather than a courtroom, and whether Alibaba issues a fuller public response will likely shape how the next chapter of this story will go.
