Anthropic Says Alibaba's Qwen Used 25,000 Fake Accounts to Mine 28.8 Million Claude Exchanges
Updated
Updated · The Washington Post · Jul 6
Anthropic Says Alibaba's Qwen Used 25,000 Fake Accounts to Mine 28.8 Million Claude Exchanges
3 articles · Updated · The Washington Post · Jul 6
Summary
Anthropic told U.S. senators that Alibaba’s Qwen team used about 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 28.8 million Claude interactions and improve its own AI.
The company says the activity was model distillation—using a larger system as a tutor for a smaller, cheaper one—which it argues violates its rules even though the technique itself is common across AI.
Anthropic also quietly deployed and then removed code that checked for Chinese time zones and domains tied to Chinese AI firms, after a developer exposed the tool and privacy advocates criticized the monitoring.
The accusation lands as Anthropic and OpenAI press Washington to treat large-scale distillation as an AI security and intellectual-property threat, while Chinese models keep narrowing the performance gap and undercutting U.S. rivals on price.
When AI models can be 'distilled,' is it intellectual property theft or just aggressive market competition?
Is the U.S. creating a more formidable AI rival by trying to cut China off from its technology?
Anthropic vs. Alibaba: Inside the 16 Million-Exchange AI Distillation Attack and Its Global Fallout
Overview
In June 2026, Anthropic accused Alibaba of running an 'industrial-scale' AI distillation campaign to extract advanced capabilities from its Claude AI models, despite US government warnings about foreign copying of frontier technologies. This alleged campaign followed similar large-scale efforts previously identified from other AI labs, showing a growing trend of sophisticated attacks targeting leading AI models. Anthropic highlighted Alibaba's US ties and noted that the fraudulent accounts were linked to Alibaba's Qwen lab. The incident has intensified US-China technology tensions and prompted calls for stronger industry and government collaboration to defend against such threats.