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Anthropic Alleges Alibaba Ran Largest Known Distillation Attack on Its Models
Anthropic told senators that operators linked to Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to query its Claude models 28.8 million times between April 22 and June 5. The company called the effort the largest known distillation attack against it and urged coordinated government and industry action.
Jun 25, 11:57 AM·1m read1 source
New York PostAudio version
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Anthropic sent a letter earlier this month to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs alleging that operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab carried out the largest known distillation attack on its systems to date, New York Post reported.
The company said the operators used roughly 25,000 fake accounts to conduct 28.8 million exchanges with its Claude models from April 22 to June 5. Anthropic described the activity as an attempt to extract capabilities from its models through distillation, a method that trains smaller systems on outputs from more advanced ones.
Anthropic stated that combating illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry. It said it will continue working with Congress and the Administration to maintain American AI leadership. The letter, addressed to Sens.
), claimed Alibaba ignored the Trump Administration’s warnings. It came less than two months after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memorandum pledging to help AI companies detect and coordinate against mass distillation. Anthropic also reported identifying three industrial-scale distillation campaigns from Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax in February.
On June 16, China’s z.AI released an open-source model called GLM-5.2 that specializes in coding projects and that the company claims matches the performance of some leading models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Alibaba did not immediately respond to The New York Post’s request for comment. In recent weeks the Trump administration launched a crackdown on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models.
