Anthropic Says Alibaba Must Be Punished For Largest Claude Cloning Attack
6 78An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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 and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) 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."
The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when "operators afliated 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." According 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. [...]
"Alibaba is governed by an independent board, none of whom has any military affiliation," Alibaba said. "Its products and services are built for retail, logistics, and enterprise information technology -- not weapons, defense, or intelligence." Anthropic appears unconvinced, however, that Alibaba isn't working with the Chinese government. In the letter, Anthropic warned that without stronger interventions, these distillation attacks will "help China reach Mythos Preview-level capabilities sooner."
To keep the US ahead of China, Anthropic recommended that Congress pass legislation with three objectives. First, antitrust laws must be updated to allow AI firms to share information about evolving Chinese tactics to deter more threats. Second, the US needs more export controls on chips to hamstring Chinese access to advanced compute so that they simply can't train on US model outputs. That could make conducting distillation attacks pointless, Anthropic suggested. Finally, Congress should pass laws penalizing Chinese labs' "bad behavior" so that it's "more difficult and costly" to rely on distillation attacks to advance Chinese models. Penalties could include limiting Chinese firms from accessing US models or advanced US chips or from relying on data centers outside of China, Anthropic suggested.
6 comments
Vizzini (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward ( None ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:17PM (#66210520)
You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen!
Re:"Working with the government" (Score: 5, Insightful)
by XopherMV ( 575514 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @03:25PM (#66210732)
China is a communist country. That's a whole other level of government involvement in the economy and specific companies such as Alibaba than you'll find anywhere in the US.
Re:"Working with the government" (Score: 5, Insightful)
by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @10:15PM (#66211268)
In communist societies communes are the companies and there is no government. Communes are like companies except the people who work in them own them. Thus "workers own the means of production."
China isn't communist. It's not even the fake communist that you get when revolutionaries establish a "transitional government," or the economically communist that China sort of was until Mao died. It is authoritarian, which is where the government has a lot of power to tell everyone what to do.
The GP didn't ignore your original comment, they corrected it.
Re:And that's how China surpassed American chip pe (Score: 5, Insightful)
by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @06:11PM (#66211028)
>"China doesn't need to catch up to the US. They can simply invade and take over Taiwan where all the chips get made these days."
Not necessarily
1) Taiwan is perfectly able to sabotage their factories or key technology parts if they are invaded.
2) The USA/allies could do #1 if needed.
3) Taiwan has been working to diversify production into some other countries, so not all their "eggs" are in one "basket".
4) If invaded, there could be severe sanctions by the USA and many other countries.
5) Some key components are supplied by the Dutch, and it is likely they would shut off all support if Taiwan was invaded.
If it were easy and risk-free, China would probably have done it already.
World's Biggest Raccoon (Score: 5, Insightful)
by bistromath007 ( 1253428 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @03:05PM (#66210678)
"Don't touch my garbage! I stole it fair and square!"
Pot... meet kettle... (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Morpeth ( 577066 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @03:33PM (#66210744)
All of these massive LLM companies were built on stealing copyrighted materials and other prior work to train their models (and then profit from it without paying for the data/images/etc), so the whole thing is hilariously thick with irony. "Hey, you can't steal the sh*t I stole!"
Now where did I put that teeny tiny violin...