Anthropic Asks Washington to Stop Chinese Companies’ AI Theft
Anthropic Asks Washington to Stop Chinese Companies’ AI Theft
Publish Date: 2026-06-24 18:39:00
Source Domain: www.pymnts.com
Anthropic is seeking U.S. government help in its fight against Chinese companies’ efforts to copy its artificial intelligence models, and said that Alibaba Group Holding is among the companies that are carrying out these attacks.
The American AI company said this in a letter that it sent to several U.S. senators and White House officials, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (June 24), citing a copy of the letter.
An Anthropic spokesperson declined to discuss the reported letter with Bloomberg but said there is a need for “coordinated action between government and industry” to combat distillation, a process in which developers use results from another AI model to train their own model at a far lower cost, according to the report.
Alibaba declined Bloomberg’s request for comment, according to the report. The company did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
According to the Bloomberg report, Anthropic said in its letter that Alibaba’s Qwen AI lab used 25,000 fraudulent accounts to illicitly access its Claude AI model, engage in 28.8 million exchanges with the model, and use the information they garner to develop rival chatbots through adversarial distillation.
The company said that AI models developed through this process lack the guardrails that Anthropic puts on its own models, and that distillation poses a threat to national security because it could enable China to reduce America’s lead in AI, per the report.
Anthropic also asked the senators and official to whom it sent the letter to clarify antitrust guidelines to allow U.S. companies to share information about distillation, to support export controls on advanced AI chips, and to penalize firms that use distillation, according to the report.
Anthropic said in a February blog post that Chinese AI labs DeepSeek, MiniMax and Moonshot AI had used distillation and the outputs of Claude to train their own models.
“These campaigns are growing in intensity and sophistication,”…
