🚨 Anthropic has accused Alibaba of running the largest known attempt to copy its Claude models. According to a letter sent to US lawmakers, operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab allegedly used 25,000 fraudulent accounts to carry out more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026. Anthropic calls this the largest distillation attack against it to date. Distillation is when a weaker model is trained on the outputs of a stronger one — repeatedly querying, collecting responses, and using that data to build a cheaper competitor. The campaign reportedly targeted Claude’s software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities — two of the most commercially valuable areas in AI. This follows earlier disclosures naming DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax in similar campaigns, but the Alibaba allegation is significantly larger in scale. Alibaba has not responded, so these remain Anthropic’s claims. Still, it reflects a growing reality: frontier models ar...