Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using 25,000 fake accounts to scrape Claude AI
Anthropic has accused Alibaba of using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from its Claude AI models, in what the US AI company described as the largest known attack of its kind against it. The campaign, carried out between April 22 and June 5, generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude, according to a June 10 letter Anthropic sent to senior members of the US Senate Banking Committee, Reuters reported . Anthropic said the effort involved “distillation,” a technique in which a less capable AI model is trained on the outputs of a more advanced system, potentially allowing rivals to replicate some of its capabilities at lower cost. The company said the campaign was conducted by operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab, according to the report. The allegation comes as businesses adopt generative AI tools across business functions, putting pressure on vendors to show they can detect misuse while keeping services available for corporate customers. The dispute also comes as AI development becomes more closely tied to US-China technology tensions . Anthropic said the alleged campaign could help accelerate China’s ability to reach the capabilities of its advanced Mythos Preview model, while US officials have stepped up scrutiny of advanced AI systems over fears they could be used by military or intelligence users in countries of concern. In February, Anthropic said it had identified similar campaigns by DeepSeek, Moonshot…
