Anthropic has accused Chinese tech giant Alibaba of orchestrating what it describes as the largest known distillation attack of its kind, allegedly using tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts to systematically extract capabilities from its AI model, Claude. The accusations were reportedly made directly to US lawmakers. The alleged operation involved nearly 25,000 fake accounts and generated close to 29 million exchanges with Claude over just six weeks. According to Anthropic’s account, operators linked to Alibaba and the company’s Qwen AI team generated 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5, 2026. The alleged campaign focused on software development, multi-step reasoning, and agentic tasks. Anthropic told lawmakers the campaign could help Chinese AI developers approach the capabilities of its Mythos Preview model, which is focused on advanced cybersecurity work. Francesco Pili, Counsel at Hogan Lovells, said the accusations are part of a broader trend of regulatory disputes over whether, and on what terms, AI systems can access third-party platforms, services, or data.