Anthropic Claims Alibaba Used 25,000 Fake Accounts and 28.8 Million Exchanges to Illicitly Distill Claude
tomshardware.com ↗
25,000 fake accounts and 28.8 million exchanges — Anthropic says Alibaba ran an industrial-scale operation to distill Claude from April to June 2026.
Anthropic has accused China's Alibaba of running a large-scale, covert operation to "distill" its Claude AI models without authorization. According to Anthropic, the effort involved roughly 25,000 fake accounts and 28.8 million exchanges with Claude, carried out between April and June 2026 — essentially using Claude's outputs at massive scale to train or improve a competing model.
Model distillation via fake accounts is a known risk in the AI industry, but the alleged scope here is striking: nearly 29 million exchanges over just a few months amounts to an industrial-grade extraction effort. Anthropic has not yet disclosed what legal or technical remedies it is pursuing.
Security / AbuseCopyright / Data