CriticalSecurity & Privacy
Anthropic says Alibaba must be punished for largest Claude cloning attack
Anthropic has documented the largest known AI model cloning attack, alleging that Alibaba conducted over 28.8 million fraudulent exchanges with Claude to illicitly extract its capabilities without incurring R&D costs, representing a significant threat to U.S. competitive advantage in AI. This coordinated distillation attack demonstrates an emerging "circumvention economy" that threatens to convert billions in American AI investment into subsidies for geopolitical competitors, with similar campaigns documented by OpenAI and Google. Anthropic is calling on Congress to update antitrust laws, strengthen chip export controls, and impose penalties on Chinese labs to make illicit model extraction more costly and difficult.
Anthropic has accused the Chinese firm Alibaba of launching the largest attack yet attempting to clone Claude, as China races to match the capabilities of Anthropic's leading model following Mythos' release and subsequent restriction from foreign markets. Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on “AI and the American Dream.” In the letter, Anthropic shared “new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities we have ever measured.” The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when “operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab” allegedly generated “more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts,” Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign “targeted some of Claude’s most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks.”Read full article Comments