Cloudmaker Anthropic on Wednesday formally accused Chinese technology and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding of carrying out a wide-ranging and highly coordinated operation to systematically siphon the core functionality of its proprietary AI systems.
In a letter sent to U.S. senators and White House officials, the San Francisco-based developer detailed what was characterized as the largest known data exfiltration campaign launched by a Chinese company against its technology, Bloomberg exclusively reported.
According to Anthropic, operators connected to Alibaba’s specialized Qwen AI lab deployed thousands of fraudulent user accounts to circumvent restrictions and access its Claude chatbot model. This unauthorized campaign directly circumvents Anthropic’s strict geographic distribution rules, which explicitly prohibit the deployment or access of Anthropic’s software within China.
Alibaba (BABA) stock fell nearly 3% on Wednesday.
Anthropic’s claims against Alibaba: Details
Anthropic claimed that Alibaba uses a technique called “adversarial distillation.” Through this mechanism, external entities repeatedly prompt the advanced model to collect its inference patterns and data structures. Competitors can then use those answers to train their own in-house AI software, avoiding millions of dollars in primary R&D costs.
“These distillation attacks are being carried out illegally, systematically, and on an industrial scale to harvest U.S. AI capabilities across Frontier laboratories and repackage them as their own, without the training and R&D costs needed to train U.S. Frontier models,” Anthropic wrote in the letter, which was accessed by Bloomberg.
Anthropic noted that when high-level AI models are cloned through fraudulent distillation, the resulting software typically removes the underlying guardrails and safety protocols built into the original U.S. platform.
Antropic called on federal lawmakers to introduce a stricter enforcement and defense framework to prevent foreign technology labs from systematically stripping domestic AI research companies of their intellectual property.
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