Anthropic accuses Alibaba of running massive AI model distillation campaign using 25,000 fake accounts

Anthropic just dropped one of the most explosive allegations in the ongoing US-China AI rivalry. In a letter sent to US Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren on June 10, 2026, the company claims that Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab ran what it describes as the largest known “distillation” campaign against its Claude model. The numbers are staggering. Anthropic alleges that operators connected to Alibaba created roughly 25,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026. That’s six weeks of systematic extraction targeting the model’s most advanced capabilities. What distillation actually means, and why it matters Instead of building capabilities from scratch, a smaller or cheaper model queries a more powerful one millions of times, studying its responses to learn how it “thinks.” The student model then replicates those capabilities without the billions of dollars in training costs. In this case, Anthropic says the operation specifically targeted software engineering and agentic reasoning functionalities associated with its Mythos Preview model. Alibaba has firmly denied any wrongdoing, calling the accusations baseless. A patter...