Anthropic Accuses Chinese Tech Giant of Extracting Claude AI Capabilities

Anthropic has accused Chinese technology firm Alibaba of illicitly extracting capabilities from its Claude AI model. In a June 10 letter to U.S. Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, Anthropic said operators linked to Alibaba used thousands of fraudulent accounts to carry out almost 29 million exchanges with Claude. The company described the activity as a large “distillation attack,” a method that uses answers from a stronger AI model to train a weaker one. It said the operators targeted Claude’s ability to handle longer, more complex tasks and its approach to decision-making, and urged Congress to act.