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Thu, 25 Jun 2026

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 Anthropic accuses Chinese rival Alibaba of illicitly extracting AI capabilities

The firm alleged that Alibaba used fraudulent accounts to access data from its Claude AI model.

* Anthropic, a US AI giant, has accused Alibaba of "brazenly" and "illicitly" extracting its Claude AI model's capabilities.
* The extraction was carried out using thousands of fraudulent accounts in what Anthropic calls the largest extraction campaign of its kind.
* The company claims that operators linked to Alibaba performed almost 29 million exchanges with Claude, targeting its most valuable capabilities.
* Anthropic says these "distillation attacks" are carried out on an "industrial scale" to enable Chinese companies to harvest and repackage US AI capabilities as their own.
* The company is urging Congress to penalize the companies behind such attacks and ramp up measures to prevent US tech from being stolen.
* Anthropic also claims that this type of attack poses a threat to the US military and turns "hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment" into a subsidy for geopolitical competitors.