Anthropic has accused Alibaba of using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from its Claude AI models, in what the US AI company described as the largest known attack of its kind against it.
The campaign, carried out between April 22 and June 5, generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude, according to a June 10 letter Anthropic sent to senior members of the US Senate Banking Committee, Reuters reported.
Anthropic said the effort involved “distillation,” a technique in which a less capable AI model is trained on the outputs of a more advanced system, potentially allowing rivals to replicate some of its capabilities at lower cost.
The company said the campaign was conducted by operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab, according to the report.
The allegation comes as businesses adopt generative AI tools across business functions, putting pressure on vendors to show they can detect misuse while keeping services available for corporate customers.
