Anthropic Says Alibaba Ran a 25K-Account Claude Heist; Congress Asked to Lock the Door 🔐

Anthropic is pressing U.S. lawmakers to tighten rules on AI model distillation, alleging that operators linked to Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab conducted the largest known effort to extract capabilities from its Claude chatbot. In a June 10 letter to Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, Anthropic said the campaign generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5 through nearly 25,000 "fraudulent accounts," defined as those not representing real, organic users. The company described the activity as a distillation attack targeting Claude's agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon planning capabilities, allowing competitors to reproduce advanced model behavior without bearing the cost of training a frontier system.

Anthropic framed the operation in unusually direct terms. "Beyond its scale, this campaign was striking for its brazen nature," the company wrote. "Alibaba is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, maintains business operations in the United States, and is accountable to U.S. investors and regulators." Anthropic also cast large-scale model distillation as a national security concern, arguing that the practice could accelerate Chinese military and cyber AI capabilities while narrowing the U.S. technological lead. "When PRC labs distill these capabilities from U.S. models, they capture the returns on American investments without bearing the costs or risks associated with training frontier AI models," Anthropic stated. "This inverts the economic logic that underwrites American AI leadership, turning billions of dollars' worth of research and development, compute, and other U.S. investments into a subsidy for our competitors."

The letter lands as Washington intensifies efforts to defend U.S. AI leadership. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order expanding AI-powered cybersecurity initiatives after delaying the measure over concerns it could weaken America's competitive position against China. Anthropic urged Congress to expand intelligence sharing between frontier AI developers and the U.S. government, clarify antitrust rules to permit AI companies to share information about distillation attacks, strengthen export controls on advanced AI chips and compute, close loopholes that allow Chinese firms to access overseas data centers, and impose penalties on companies responsible for large-scale model extraction.

Separately, a leaker using the handle "synthwavedd" on X posted that Claude Code version 2.1.190 contains new strings referencing a return of Fable 5 with weekly usage baked directly into subscription plans, citing the line: "You've used your Fable 5 usage for this week." Anthropic has not commented on the leak or any product plans related to Fable 5.