Anthropic has accused Alibaba of launching the largest campaign yet to clone its Claude model, as China seeks to match the capabilities of Anthropic’s leading AI system following the release of Mythos and its subsequent restriction from foreign markets. In a letter obtained by Ars Technica, Anthropic detailed how Alibaba and its AI lab, Alibaba Qwen, allegedly generated over 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April 22 and June 5. The campaign targeted some of Claude’s most valuable capabilities, including agentic reasoning and long-horizon tasks, while violating the model’s terms of service and access restrictions. Anthropic warned that Alibaba used obfuscation techniques and proxy networks to evade detection, highlighting a growing circumvention economy that fuels future distillation attacks.
Alibaba allegedly aimed to extract Claude’s capabilities without incurring the training and R&D costs required to develop its own frontier model, according to Anthropic. The firm argued that these attacks have become widespread, turning hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment and R&D into a subsidy for geopolitical competitors. Anthropic emphasized that the campaign occurred after Donald Trump took steps to curb such illicit distillation attacks and defend US national security. Despite Trump’s warnings, Alibaba allegedly continued its efforts, which Anthropic said were seemingly unfazed by the threats.
The source text is from arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities/.
