The alleged distillation suggests that enterprises should conduct due diligence into how AI labs handle their data.
June 25, 2026
Anthropic’s accusation that Chinese AI giant Alibaba orchestrated a distillation attack to acquire Claude’s capabilities could spur enterprises to be more diligent about the information and data shared when using AI models like Claude, Gemini and GPT.
The AI lab sent a letter on June 12 to U.S. senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, claiming that Alibaba created 25,000 fake accounts to access Claude, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Chinese vendor allegedly accessed some of the AI model’s capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering and long-horizon tasks. Anthropic also said that operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab used the accounts to run nearly 30 million exchanges from April to June.
Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
