Anthropic accuses Alibaba of trying to copy Claude at scale
Anthropic accused Alibaba-linked operators and the Qwen AI lab of trying to pull useful abilities out of Claude. The method at issue is , where answers from a stronger AI model are used to train a smaller or cheaper model.
According to Anthropic, the activity ran from April 22 to June 5, 2026, and involved about 25,000 fake accounts and 28.8 million interactions with Claude. The targeted abilities included software engineering, , and handling long tasks.
Anthropic argues this could let rival labs build stronger models without paying the full research and training cost. Alibaba had not publicly responded at the time of the reports.
Key points
- Anthropic accused Alibaba-linked operators of trying to extract Claude’s abilities.
- The alleged activity used about 25,000 fake accounts.
- Anthropic cited 28.8 million Claude interactions between April 22 and June 5, 2026.
- The targeted skills included software engineering, , and long task handling.
- can reduce model-building costs, but unauthorized use can become a legal and policy problem.