Anthropic accuses Alibaba of running largest distillation campaign against Claude

Anthropic has accused Alibaba's Qwen AI lab of orchestrating the largest known model distillation campaign against a US AI company, using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to conduct approximately 29 million exchanges with Claude between April and June 2026. The campaign targeted Claude's software engineering and agentic reasoning capabilities. This exceeds the combined volume of earlier alleged distillation attacks by DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI. Anthropic sent a letter to US senators and White House officials urging coordinated government-industry action, including antitrust clarifications, export controls on AI chips, and penalties for distillation. Lawmakers are drafting legislation to sanction Chinese firms found improperly accessing US AI model outputs. The accusations come as Anthropic prepares for an IPO and is simultaneously fighting a separate US government export restriction on its own Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, placing the company in a complex political position.