Anthropic accuses Alibaba of copying Claude by asking it millions of
questions and sets the stage for a new AI war

Date:
Sat, 27 Jun 2026 01:00:00 +0000

Description:
Anthropic's allegations against Alibaba have turned model distillation into one of the most important AI fights.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Anthropic has accused groups linked to Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab of carrying out a massive campaign to extract capabilities from Claude just by asking it a lot of questions, as first reported by Reuters . The AI developer wrote a letter to U.S. lawmakers alleging that Alibaba used nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to generate more than 28.8 million interactions and glean detailed, proprietary information about Claude.

Alibaba has not publicly responded to the allegations, and there has been no independent confirmation of Anthropic's claims, but simply leveling them has potentially enormous consequences. The sheer volume of accounts and interactions is eye-catching, but it's even more fascinating how it reveals a vulnerability in AI models that can give away their secrets. AI developers
may now have to worry that rivals can learn from those models without ever seeing the underlying code or training data through a technique known as
model distillation. Essentially, AI models will inadvertently share deliberately obscured facts about themselves if a huge number of the right questions are asked. As an analogy, imagine taking a test about a book, but instead of reading the book, you ask the author one million questions about their life, their thinking, their experience writing the book, and several hundred thousand more questions. You'd probably have a pretty good chance of knowing everything they might have written without once cracking the covers. Latest Videos From Watch full video here: Can you copy an AI just by talking to it? Model distillation is a common technique used by AI companies to build variations of their models, especially smaller, faster options. But no
company would be okay with a rival using their model to train the
competition. But that's what Anthropic alleges. The fake accounts supposedly asked Claude a ton of very complex and detailed questions related to its advanced software engineering and agentic reasoning features. The responses filled in a picture of the model's workings, accelerating Alibaba's own development of competing AI systems, Anthropic claimed.

The conundrum is obvious. Large language models are designed to answer questions. Every answer teaches the user something about how the model behaves. You can't interact with an AI model, or a person, without giving up some information about yourself. Normally, that wouldn't matter, but at the scale Anthropic is claiming, conversations become reverse engineering. You
may like Anthropic detects 'strategic manipulation' features in Claude Mythos Anthropic blames sci-fi for bad AI behavior Anthropic issues copyright takedown requests to stem Claude Code leak

It's not the first time Anthropic has alleged illicit model distillation. Anthropic levied similar claims against DeepSeek , Moonshot AI, and MiniMax earlier this year. And other companies, including OpenAI, have expressed concern that they have also been victims of the technique.

The glaring irony that the companies that used enormous collections of publicly available information, including licensed material, to train their
AI models are now arguing about how those same models are valuable intellectual property is hard to ignore. Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. AI arms race AI developers see their models' behavior as crucial to competing with rivals. If another company can
reproduce much of that behavior by asking enough carefully designed
questions, spending billions of dollars training frontier models starts to seem like a waste.

Anthropic claims model distillation can effectively transfer years of work on their part to another company for almost nothing. Anthropic asked lawmakers
to take action and combat this problem as soon as possible. If leading models can be imitated so easily, there won't be much incentive to innovate, and the AI competition will only be about beating copycats. And picking the best models will be difficult, as a new AI model that matches an existing one's capabilities might be born of years of original research or simply copying an existing option.

Whether Anthropic ultimately proves its allegations, they have revealed that the next great AI battle may not be about building the smartest model. It may be about stopping somebody else from talking to your model and learning how
it operates, one question at a time. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. The best business laptops for all budgets Our top picks, based on real-world testing and comparisons

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/anthropic-accuses-alibaba-of -copying-claude-by-asking-it-millions-of-questions-and-sets-the-stage-for-a-ne w-ai-war


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