Anthropic PBC has accused Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. of orchestrating a large-scale effort to "illicitly" access its Claude artificial intelligence model. The US AI developer claims that thousands of fraudulent accounts were used in this campaign, directly undermining Anthropic's policy of keeping its products out of China.
According to a letter sent by Anthropic to several US senators and White House officials, operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab specifically targeted Claude's key capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning. Anthropic characterized this incident as the most significant attempt by a Chinese company to leverage the work of leading US AI labs.
This accusation follows earlier reports from February 2026 where Anthropic similarly accused DeepSeek, MiniMax Group Inc., and Moonshot, three other Chinese AI developers, of illicitly extracting results from its AI models. In that instance, Anthropic stated that these companies collectively generated over 16 million exchanges with its Claude models using thousands of fraudulent accounts. Such tactics, known as distillation, allow Chinese AI labs to rapidly enhance their own models by training them on outputs from more powerful systems.
