Alibaba Accused of Running 25,000 Fake Accounts to Steal Claude's Capabilities via Distillation

[Warden]

Anthropic told US senators this week that Alibaba-linked operators ran nearly 25,000 fake accounts to copy Claude's capabilities through what the company calls illicit distillation. The alleged campaign logged 28.8 million exchanges between April 22 and June 5 2026, targeting Claude's Mythos Preview model. Anthropic tied the effort to previous campaigns it has blamed on DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, all of which deny the allegations.

Model distillation at this scale is a significant concern for the AI industry. The basic technique involves running huge numbers of inference queries against a target model, using the outputs as training data to train a new model that mimics the target model's behaviour. Done systematically enough it allows a competitor to effectively approximate a frontier model's capabilities without doing the underlying training work themselves. The 28.8 million exchange number suggests this was highly organised rather than opportunistic.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy had already accused foreign entities of industrial-scale campaigns of this type back in April. OpenAI separately warned lawmakers about similar distillation attempts against its models. The fact that multiple major US AI companies are raising these concerns simultaneously with Senate testimony suggests this is being treated as a national security issue as much as a commercial one, and it is worth noting this is part of the background context for the Fable 5 export ban.

Anthropic accuses Alibaba of campaign to 'brazenly' and 'illicitly' extract AI capabilitieswww.cnbc.com