TL;DRAnthropic accused Alibaba’s Qwen lab of using 25,000 fake accounts for nearly 29 million Claude exchanges, the biggest such campaign yet.
Anthropic has accused Alibaba of waging the largest distillation campaign yet against a US AI company, telling senators and White House officials that operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract Claude’s capabilities between April and June. The letter, a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg, described nearly 29 million exchanges with Claude targeting software engineering and agentic reasoning, the model’s most commercially valuable skills.
The accusation marks the first time Anthropic has named a major Chinese technology conglomerate as the source of a distillation attack. Previous allegations in February targeted smaller Chinese AI startups, including DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI, which Anthropic said had collectively generated more than 16 million exchanges through about 24,000 fake accounts. The Alibaba campaign alone exceeded the combined volume of all three earlier efforts.
Distillation is the practice of feeding carefully constructed queries to a frontier AI model, collecting its responses, and using those responses to train a cheaper rival system that approximates the original’s capabilities. The White House flagged the technique as a national security concern in April, when OSTP Director Michael Kratsios published a memo committing the government to share intelligence with US AI labs about foreign distillation campaigns. Anthropic said in its letter that the Alibaba campaign took place after the Kratsios memo, in defiance of the administration’s warnings.
