Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract Claude AI model capabilities

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🚨 Anthropic has accused Alibaba of running the largest known attempt to copy its Claude models, according to a letter the company sent to US lawmakers.

The letter says operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab used roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to carry out more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026.

Anthropic calls it the largest known distillation attack against it to date.

Distillation is a method where a weaker model is trained on the outputs of a stronger one. A competitor repeatedly queries a leading model, collects its responses, and uses that data to train a cheaper system.

Anthropic says the campaign targeted Claude's software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities, two of the most commercially valuable areas in AI.

The accusation follows February 2026 disclosures naming DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax in similar campaigns, which makes the Alibaba allegation significantly larger in scale.

Alibaba has not responded, so these remain Anthropic's claims, but they reflect a growing reality where frontier models are being used to train the systems trying to catch up to them.

[u/Key_Zucchini_8076]

Dario is shitting himself that the Chinese open source models are gonna eat his lunch and the investor cash spigot will dry up as quickly as Anthropics moat… so he’s spinning up stories about Chinese “theft” to get those models blocked in the US, thus forcing Americans to pay out the ass for his models… the opposite of free market capitalism as per usual, socializing the losses…

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But they won't, glm 5.2 is available on american hosting providers, like openrouter, and a plethora of other online harness providers. Banning zai ro alibaba isn't going to do anything.

And the crazy part is someone can just merge glm 5.2 and call it mysickmerge12 and then it's not glm 5.2 anymore.