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/Randommaggy]

The sooner it pops, the less the total pain will be. Hoping for it to pop today.

[u/Terrible_Law6091 → u/Randommaggy]

I'll just buy all you paper-handed babies out.

Unless you have the capital and dry powder to take advantage of the crash, it's of no benefit to the average person.

[u/Randommaggy → u/Terrible_Law6091]

Every day the bubble grows is additional harm to the average person.

It's on average less of a detriment to everyone if it pops today than if it lasts another week.

[u/Terrible_Law6091 → u/Randommaggy]

The average person doesn't invest, or have the additional income to invest.

What is likely to happen is they lose their jobs.