Anthropic accused Alibaba of “brazenly” and “illicitly” trying to extract its artificial intelligence capabilities, calling it “the largest known distillation attack on Anthropic to date.” In a letter to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs earlier this month, Anthropic alleged that operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab conducted 28.8 million exchanges with its Claude models using about 25,000 fake accounts between April 22 and June 5. Distillation is an AI training method where a smaller model is built using outputs from a more sophisticated model. An Anthropic spokesperson stated, “We believe combating the threat of illicit distillation requires coordinated action between government and industry.” Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic’s letter claimed Alibaba “ignored the Trump Administration’s warnings.” Anthropic also said in February it had identified three “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns from three other Chinese AI labs: DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax.