Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Largest AI Distillation Attack to Date

Anthropic alleges that between April 22 and June 5, 2026, operators linked to Alibaba executed roughly 29 million exchanges through about 25,000 fraudulent accounts in a large-scale distillation attack aimed at illicitly extracting Claude AI's software engineering and reasoning capabilities. Anthropic characterizes the operation as industrial-scale intellectual property theft that could accelerate the capabilities of adversary AI models, is urging legislative and regulatory action, and notes Alibaba denies wrongdoing while legal disputes continue.