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Jun 26, 2026

Anthropic Accuses China's Alibaba of Trying to Steal Its AI Tech with 'Distillation' Attack

Anthropic Accuses China’s Alibaba of Trying to Steal Its AI Tech with ‘Distillation’ Attack

Dario Amodei says Alibaba stole from Anthropic
Michael M. Santiago/Getty
Lucas Nolan26 Jun 2026

Anthropic has accused Chinese technology giant Alibaba of carrying out what it describes as the largest known attempt to extract its AI capabilities through a “distillation” attack.

CNBC reports that AI giant Anthropic sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on June 10, accusing Alibaba of brazenly and illicitly attempting to extract its AI capabilities. The letter, which was addressed to Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican (R-SC), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was obtained and confirmed by CNBC this week.

According to the letter, Alibaba carried out what Anthropic described as the largest known distillation attack on the company to date. Distillation is an AI training method where a smaller, less capable model is built using outputs from an existing, stronger model. Anthropic stated that operators affiliated with Alibaba and its AI lab conducted 28.8 million exchanges with Anthropic’s models using approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April 22 and June 5.

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