Anthropic has declared war on what it describes as a massive, coordinated effort by Chinese tech companies to siphon knowledge from its flagship AI model, Claude. The company is now deploying identity verification, time-zone monitoring, and aggressive account purges to shut down access routes that have allegedly been exploited through overseas subsidiaries and proxy services.
The scale of the alleged extraction is staggering. According to the Financial Times, Anthropic accused Alibaba-affiliated entities in mid-June 2026 of orchestrating the largest extraction campaign it has ever detected, involving more than 25,000 fraudulent accounts that generated approximately 28.8 million exchanges with Claude.
What distillation campaigns look like
Anthropic had already uncovered a prior distillation campaign involving roughly 24,000 fake accounts and more than 16 million exchanges. The Alibaba-linked operation that surfaced in June was even larger, suggesting the problem was accelerating rather than shrinking.
How Anthropic is fighting back
