Anthropic Reports Alibaba Distillation Attack to Senate Committee

Anthropic sent a letter dated June 10 to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs accusing Alibaba of carrying out the largest known distillation attack on its artificial intelligence models to date, Cnbc reported. The letter, addressed to Sen.

And Sen. , stated that operators affiliated with Alibaba and its AI lab conducted 28.8 million exchanges using roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April 22 and June 5. An Anthropic spokesperson said the company believes combating illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry.

The spokesperson added that Anthropic will continue working with Congress and the Administration to maintain American AI leadership. A representative for Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The letter lands two months after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memorandum pledging to help AI companies detect and coordinate against industrial-scale distillation.

Anthropic wrote that Alibaba ignored the Trump Administration's warnings in proceeding with the attacks. In February, Anthropic announced it had identified three industrial-scale distillation campaigns from DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. Earlier this month, the company received an export control directive from the Trump administration ordering suspension of access to its Claude models Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national.

To meet with administration officials, and both parties are working quickly to resolve the directive, Anthropic told Cnbc.