Anthropic accused one of China’s largest technology companies of abusing its advanced AI models.
In a June 10 letter to Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sarah Heck, head of policy at Anthropic, said that Alibaba recently launched “the largest distillation attack ever known” against the company.
In a letter obtained by Business Insider, Heck said that Alibaba-affiliated entities had attempted to “unauthorizedly extract Claude’s capabilities” to train Alibaba’s own models, and called for legislation to prevent further attacks.
Between April 22 and June 5, the operators had “28.8 million interactions with Claude through approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts,” Heck wrote.
Distillation attacks refer to the use of advanced AI models to train and improve the capabilities of less advanced models. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba develops AI models, including Qwen LLM, under its Alibaba Cloud umbrella.
“These distillation attacks are being carried out illegally, systematically, and on an industrial scale to harvest America’s AI capabilities across Frontier laboratories and repackage them as their own, without the training and R&D costs needed to train America’s Frontier models,” Heck wrote to senators.
He added that this attack could allow Chinese models to reach Claude Mythos Preview-level functionality sooner. Mythos is one of Anthropic’s most advanced LLMs, detecting software vulnerabilities and outperforming humans in cybersecurity tasks.
He asked senators for further legislation against distillation attacks, including restricting China’s access to advanced computing infrastructure in the United States and penalizing Chinese companies that carry out distillation attacks.
Anthropic’s letter to lawmakers comes weeks after the U.S. government banned foreign access and imposed export restrictions on the latest model, the Fable 5, citing national security risks.
This is the latest blow to Alibaba, which was also recently added to the Pentagon’s blacklist of companies with ties to the Chinese military. Alibaba sued the U.S. government Tuesday seeking this designation.
As of press time on Thursday, Alibaba stock was down more than 4%.
A representative for Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.