Anthropic Claims Alibaba Massively Distilled Claude
RajmaChawala · reddit · 2026-07-14
Anthropic informed the US Senate that Alibaba used approximately 25,000 fake accounts to conduct around 28.8 million conversations with Claude over 6 weeks. The goal was to "copy" its agentic reasoning and coding capabilities to train Qwen.
The post emphasizes that this was not a hack, but rather massive API usage just like a regular customer. Anthropic described it as the largest distillation attack in the company's history. Since it might not be explicitly illegal under current laws, they chose to write to Congress rather than file a lawsuit directly. The author also linked this incident to the Fable 5 export ban, discussing whether massive distillation should be prohibited by legislation.
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