A 1992 anti-piracy campaign, "Don't Copy That Floppy" by the Software Publisher's Association, warned against illicitly copying software, arguing it devalues human labor and disincentivizes new software creation. Today, similar battles involve intellectual property theft in artificial intelligence. Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google spend billions on advanced frontier AI models, while smaller labs lacking resources have been accused of copying from larger players. In a June 10, 2026 formal letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, Anthropic accused the Chinese research division behind Alibaba’s Qwen LLM of massive IP theft via an adversarial distillation attack. A U.S. government memorandum from earlier in 2026 from the Office of Science and Technology Policy stated that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems, leveraging tens of thousands of proxy.