If you thought IP theft in tech was limited to stolen code repos and midnight server raids, welcome to the AI era’s version: tens of thousands of fake accounts systematically milking frontier models until they’ve extracted enough to build a competitive clone. OpenAI and Anthropic are now publicly sounding the alarm that Chinese AI labs are doing exactly that, at industrial scale.
Anthropic disclosed that operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab ran what it described as the largest distillation campaign ever measured, generating more than 28.8 million interactions with its Claude system between April 22 and June 5, 2026. The operation used roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts.
The distillation playbook
Here’s how this works in plain English. “Distillation” means feeding a powerful AI model carefully crafted prompts, collecting its outputs, and then using that data to train a cheaper, smaller model that mimics the original’s capabilities.
This isn’t a one-off incident. Back in February 2026, Anthropic identified a separate wave involving around 24,000 fake accounts that produced 16 million Claude interactions. Those campaigns were attributed to operators connected to DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.
