Anthropic has launched a serious accusation against Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, alleging the company orchestrated the largest known 'distillation' attack on its artificial intelligence systems. The San Francisco-based firm claims that operators connected to Alibaba's Qwen AI division used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to bombard its Claude chatbot with over 28 million queries between late April and early June 2026.
This development marks a significant escalation in the struggle for AI supremacy between the United States and China. According to a letter sent by Anthropic to Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren on 10 June, the campaign targeted high-value capabilities, including software engineering, long-horizon tasks, and agentic reasoning.
