Anthropic accuses Alibaba of using 25,000 fake accounts to scrape Claude AI

Anthropic has accused Alibaba of orchestrating the largest known model-extraction attack against it, using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate 28.8 million queries against Claude AI between April 22 and June 5. The alleged campaign employed 'distillation,' a technique where a weaker model is trained on outputs from a more capable one, potentially allowing Alibaba's Qwen lab to replicate Claude's capabilities at lower cost. This follows earlier accusations by Anthropic against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax for similar activity. Analysts warn that model extraction is escalating into a systemic AI supply-chain risk, urging enterprises to demand vendor transparency, rate-limit controls, abuse detection, and contractual bans on distillation. The incident also intersects with US-China technology tensions, as US officials scrutinize advanced AI systems that could benefit foreign military or intelligence users.

Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4189342/anthropic-accuses-alibaba-of-using-25000-fake-accounts-to-scrape-claude-ai.html. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.