{"slug": "anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities", "title": "Anthropic claims Alibaba defied Trump to attack Claude and steal capabilities", "summary": "Anthropic accused Alibaba of orchestrating the largest known campaign to clone its Claude AI model, generating over 28.8 million exchanges through 25,000 fraudulent accounts between April and June 2026. The attacks targeted Claude's most valuable capabilities, including agentic reasoning and software engineering, and allegedly defied Trump administration warnings against such industrial-scale AI theft.", "body_md": "Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic’s leading model following [Mythos’ release](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/anthropic-limits-access-to-mythos-its-new-cybersecurity-ai-model/) and subsequent [restriction from foreign markets](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/anthropic-shuts-down-fable-mythos-models-following-trump-admin-directive/).\n\nArs obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on “AI and the American Dream.” In the letter, Anthropic shared “new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities we have ever measured.”\n\nThe attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when “operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab” allegedly generated “more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts,” Anthropic said. Violating Claude’s terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign “targeted some of Claude’s most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks.”\n\nAccording to Anthropic, Alibaba evaded detection by “using obfuscation techniques and proxy networks.” As Chinese demand for reliable obfuscation techniques increases, Anthropic warned there’s already “a growing circumvention economy” to fuel an ever-expanding web of future distillation attacks.\n\n## Alibaba allegedly ignored Trump warning\n\nLike other Chinese labs attempting to copy US frontier models, Alibaba’s aim, Anthropic alleged, was to extract Claude’s capabilities “without incurring the training and R&D costs required to train” their own frontier model. These attacks have become “widespread” and “turn hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment and R&D into a massive subsidy for our geopolitical competitors,” Anthropic said.\n\nImportantly, Anthropic said, the Alibaba campaign occurred after Donald Trump took steps to curb such illicit distillation attacks and defend US national security. Back in April, Trump [accused China of “industrial-scale” AI theft](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/us-accuses-china-of-industrial-scale-ai-theft-china-says-its-slander/) after Anthropic [accused](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks) Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using the same tactic as Alibaba allegedly used to generate “over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.” OpenAI and Google have published findings on similar attacks on their models, Anthropic said.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities", "canonical_source": "https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities/", "published_at": "2026-06-25 18:01:48+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-25 18:13:01.264611+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy", "ai-research", "large-language-models", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Anthropic", "Alibaba", "Alibaba Qwen", "Claude", "Mythos", "Tim Scott", "Elizabeth Warren", "Donald Trump"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/anthropic-claims-alibaba-defied-trump-to-attack-claude-and-steal-capabilities.jsonld"}}