Anthropic accuses operators linked to Alibaba of extracting Claude for Qwen
Anthropic is at the center of a dispute that goes far beyond a simple terms of service violation. The company accused operators linked to Alibaba's AI lab Qwen of using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts to extract capabilities from Claude between April and June 2026. The accusation, which gained traction in a post on the social network X, raises questions about who can access cutting-edge US artificial intelligence and how cloud accounts are verified.
Anthropic says the campaign generated more than 28.8 million interactions with Claude, focusing on software engineering and agentic reasoning. These are capabilities that make Claude valuable for developers and enterprise workflows. Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, is turning this issue into a political fight over export controls, arguing that if a restricted entity can access a cutting-edge model through proxy accounts, this amounts to indirect access to the underlying capacity.
What Anthropic says happened
The distillation technique, common in AI labs, involves training a smaller or cheaper model with the outputs of a stronger model. Anthropic alleges that third-party operators used fraudulent accounts to generate large volumes of Claude responses, which could be used to train or improve another model. In February, Anthropic had already accused other companies of similar campaigns, but the allegation against Alibaba is larger in volume.
The letter sent to the US Senate highlights that the operation was the largest known against the company so far. Anthropic is pushing for distillation attacks to be treated as an export control issue, especially when large volumes of computing and infrastructure are involved.
Why Qwen is the point of contention
Alibaba has made Qwen the center of its AI strategy, offering access to developers and enterprises through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. This puts Qwen in direct competition with models from other giants like OpenAI and Google. Anthropic's accusation does not prove that Qwen's capabilities came from Claude, but it does point out that operators affiliated with Alibaba carried out the extraction campaign.
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