Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of 28.8M Model Distillation Attacks in June Letter to Congress

According to Anthropic's June 10 letter to the Senate Banking Committee, Alibaba-affiliated operators conducted the largest known AI model distillation campaign against Claude, generating over 28.8 million exchanges between April 22 and June 5 using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. The company alleged that the campaign targeted Claude's advanced reasoning and software engineering capabilities, allowing competitors to reproduce frontier AI behavior without bearing training costs.

Anthropicurged Congress to strengthen export controls on advanced AI chips, expand intelligence sharing between frontier AI developers and the U.S. government, clarify antitrust rules to permit information-sharing about distillation attacks, and impose penalties on companies responsible for large-scale unauthorized model extraction.