ANTHROPIC ACCUSES ALIBABA OF RUNNING 25,000 FAKE ACCOUNTS TO STEAL CLAUDE’S BRAIN The model theft war between American AI labs and Chinese competitors just escalated in a dramatic way. Anthropic sent a letter to US senators in June accusing Alibaba’s Qwen AI division of running what it described as the largest known model distillation attack in history. Between April 22 and June 5, 2026, operators affiliated with Alibaba allegedly created approximately 25,000 fraudulent accounts and used them to generate more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude. The goal was to train Alibaba’s own AI on Claude’s outputs, essentially copying the capabilities of a frontier model at a fraction of what it costs to build one from scratch. This practice is called distillation, and it is not new. In February, Anthropic disclosed similar attacks from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, which together involved about 24,000 accounts and 16 million exchanges. The Alibaba operation, if accurate, exceeds all three combined. Two days after the letter reached Senate Banking Committee members Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren, the Commerce Department imposed export restrictions on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models. Both were shut down globally. The connection between that letter and that decision has not been officially confirmed, but the timing is not subtle. Keywords: Anthropic Alibaba model theft, Claude AI distillation attack, Chinese AI espionage, Qwen model distillation