IN A NUTSHELL: Anthropic has accused Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba of illegally extracting capabilities from its Claude AI model using 25,000 fake accounts. According to the San Francisco-based AI startup, accounts operated by Alibaba's Qwen AI team engaged in more than 28.8 million conversations with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026, as part of a coordinated "distillation attack."
In a letter sent to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren on June 10, Anthropic accused the Chinese tech giant of carrying out what it described as the largest recorded corporate espionage campaign against the company. It alleged that Alibaba sought to illicitly extract Claude's capabilities in order to train a smaller, less capable AI model to better respond to a wide range of queries.
A distillation attack, also known as a model extraction attack, is a form of intellectual property theft in which operators affiliated with an AI firm query a rival company's model through public APIs and use the outputs to train their own system. The attacker typically interacts with the target AI chatbot like an ordinary user, but at an industrial scale, using millions of carefully crafted prompts.
The letter further alleged that the attacks were designed to help Alibaba's Qwen AI model access some of the advanced capabilities of Anthropic's frontier "Mythos Preview" model, which the company claims represents a significant improvement over older systems like Claude Opus, particularly in areas such as coding and digital security.
