Good morning. Today’s word of the day is “adversarial distillation,” which Anthropic accuses Alibaba of doing to its AI models in a new letter to U.S. lawmakers.
Alibaba allegedly accessed Anthropic’s Claude for three months to illicitly extract its capabilities in a presumed bid to train Alibaba’s rival AI chabot, Qwen, at a fraction of the cost.
We’re not talking about a handful of times here: Anthropic said Alibaba made 28.8 million exchanges with Claude via almost 25,000 accounts in a pattern that mimicked prior scraping attempts by other Chinese developers. Alibaba shares dropped 3% on the news.
As it so happens, Alibaba sued the Pentagon this week for its inclusion on a U.S. military list of “Chinese military companies.” One can’t help but wonder how the Hangzhou company will support its claims of reputational damage given this latest news.
More tech news below. —Andrew Nusca
