The Biter Bit, Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of Copying Claude

Anthropic is furious, and you can see why. In a letter to US lawmakers and the White House, the company behind Claude accuses Chinese giant Alibaba of running the largest campaign yet to strip-mine its models^[1]. The technique has a tidy name, distillation, which means hammering a strong model with questions, harvesting its answers, and training a cheaper rival to imitate them^[2]. From where Anthropic sits, that's years of research and billions of dollars evaporating in a few weeks. From a step back, it's the biter bit.

Twenty-five thousand fake accounts to copy Claude

The numbers are dizzying. Between April 22 and June 5, operators tied to Alibaba and its Qwen lab allegedly spun up close to twenty-five thousand fake accounts to query Claude some 28.8 million times, hiding their tracks behind proxy networks^[3]. The queries went after the model's most valuable skills, coding and agentic reasoning, its knack for running long tasks on its own without anyone holding its hand^[1:1]. Alibaba then allegedly poured the haul into its own Qwen models, which in Anthropic's words turns "hundreds of billions of dollars in American investment" into "a massive subsidy for our geopolitical competitors"^[2:1].

When distillation becomes a matter of state

This is well past a business spat. Anthropic took its case to Congress and the White House, asking for penalties on Chinese labs, tighter chip export controls, and an antitrust carve-out so AI firms can pool intelligence on Chinese tactics^[3:1]. The timing isn't innocent, since the campaign allegedly ran in open defiance of the administration's warnings, days after Washington locked down access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models^[4]. Alibaba denies all of it, casting itself as a company run by an independent board with no military ties, and has separately sued to get off a US blacklist^[2:2]. It's also the first time Anthropic has named a Chinese heavyweight, after fingering smaller outfits like DeepSeek and Moonshot back in February^[1:2].

The biter, the bitten, and everyone else

Then comes the part that itches. Just as Anthropic decries theft that's "illicit, systematic, and at industrial scale," the company is fending off several suits accusing it of training Claude on copyrighted work without asking anyone. Three music publishers, Universal, Concord, and ABKCO, want some $3 billion for more than twenty thousand songs used without a license, while a fourth, BMG, argues that Anthropic's whole valuation rests on stolen work^[5]. Anthropic pleads fair use, the very argument Alibaba could hand right back, since distilling a model mostly amounts to reading very carefully whatever it's willing to say.

That's the whole discomfort. I get Anthropic's rage, because watching a rival vacuum up your work would sicken any maker. But the industry now howling about theft is the same one that swept up books, articles, and songs by the million to build its models, and keeps doing it while insisting it's all progress. You can't treat copying as a mortal sin when it's aimed at you and a footnote when it works in your favor.

So should we call it a wash and blame everyone alike? Not quite, since a state running an industrial heist isn't a poet borrowing a line. But the next time a big model plays the victim, we get to ask where exactly the data came from that made it so valuable. Distillation may have invented nothing, except a mirror.