Alibaba and its US payment processor AUS Merchant Services (an Ant International unit operating Alipay) have agreed to pay $600 million to settle a DOJ investigation into illegal pharmaceutical sales on Alibaba's platform. Between 2016 and 2024, roughly 80,000 purchases of unapproved drugs, regulated chemicals, and drug counterfeiting equipment worth over $200 million were made by overseas customers. Alibaba admitted its compliance controls failed to stop third-party sellers from circumventing filters, and internal employees had flagged the issues. The settlement is one of the largest the DOJ has secured against a Chinese tech company for platform compliance failures, and comes amid other US regulatory and legal pressures on Alibaba, including accusations of AI model distillation and a Pentagon military-company designation.
